


Angels Under Fire

by CatieBrie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Barebacking, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Case Fic, Completed, Dark John Watson, Drug Abuse, Drunk Sex, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Fingering, Gas Lighting, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Post HLV, Resolved Sexual Tension, Rimming, Rough Sex, Sherlock Whump, Suicidal Thoughts, Unresolved Sexual Tension, guys this story will not be happy, it just won't, no happy ending, tags will probably be rearranged at a later date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-03-07 18:15:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3178307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatieBrie/pseuds/CatieBrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock’s heart is pulp.</p><p>He had never wanted to see this life stilled before his own.  Yet here he stands, still drawing breath with hands too clean for the guilt lining him in lead.  He stares down at his mistake.</p><p><i>I’m so sorry</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act I Scene i

**Author's Note:**

> I'm finally setting this free. I can't keep it pulled tight to the chest anymore. That being said--this is not going to be a happy story, there will be no happy ending and you really, really ought to read the tags before getting into this.
> 
> ALSO THIS IS THE INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. What do I mean by that? Glad you asked! I mean that every chapter already written is over 3,000 words. 
> 
> This story should update every other Friday but for more up-to-date information follow me on [Tumblr](http://catie-brie.tumblr.com/) where I will post more information/status updates for this and any other story.

Sherlock’s heart is pulp.

He had never wanted to see this life stilled before his own.  Yet here he stands, still drawing breath with hands too clean for the guilt lining him in lead.  He stares down at his mistake.

 _I’m so sorry_.

\--

Sherlock looked at the body with little more than complete disdain.  Mary Watson lay sprawled out, fingers hooked into claws around the bulge of her womb, the tips red with lacquer and blood.  Studded through the bare flesh were two neat holes, a third darkened her brow a bit to the right of dead center—a left-handed shooter? Trajectory thrown off by the glass?  

He looked over his shoulder to examine the window and found it spider-webbed and shattered in places; when he turned back around he saw the wall was peppered with the three bullets, wallpaper peeling away from the metal and rouged around the perimeter. He used their placement to determine which set of flats across the street would have housed the shooter, mentally cataloguing the windows the shooter could have taken aim from; dominant hand indeterminate from the current data.

“Who would want to kill Mary?”  Lestrade stepped into the room as Sherlock finished examining the wall.  

He had finally managed to compose himself into a semblance of Detective Inspector and not Concerned Friend. Sherlock understood the effort it took; John seemed so small curled up as he was on the generic IKEA couch in the living area. It was a reality hard to deal with.

“Quite a few people, actually.”  Sherlock stood, stepped gingerly over the wings of Mary’s satiny bathrobe—noting the Rorschach patterns her blood had painted onto the material—and met Lestrade by the door.  “This was personal. She was two weeks from her due date—he shot her in the abdomen first, killing the child and making sure she knew. Did it again to be spiteful. He wanted her to suffer before he shot her between the eyes.  He had to be professional—his hand didn’t shake and he hit his target more or less spot on each time.”

“But Mary was—“

“Mary wasn’t.  Whatever you believed about Mary, you were wrong.”  Sherlock grinned, displaying his teeth in such a way that Lestrade would not be able to take it as a show of amusement.

“She was John’s wife.”

“Well, yes. She was that.”  

Sherlock pulled the right lapel of his Belstaff to the side and pointed at the spot right below his chest.  Lestrade’s eyes widened in sudden understanding and Sherlock had to credit him with just a bit of intelligence.

“She was the one who shot you?”  He carded a hand through stiff grey and coal hair and his jaw worked like he wanted to say something more but Sherlock cut him off before he started.

“I didn’t tell you because I needed her here.  John probably didn’t tell you in some misguided, protective sentiment.  He still loved her, or at least the child.”  Sherlock straightened his coat back out.  “The issue was a bit above your pay grade.”

“I’m also your friend, you twat.”

Sherlock ignored the comment.  

“We’re not going to catch the shooter. He’s long gone now that his job is nice and cold.  He probably left as soon as he saw her hit the ground; melted in with the work crowd.”

“Fuck,” Lestrade hissed.  “Is there nothing else you can give me?”

Sherlock looked around, saw the half-packed bag sticking out from beneath the bed, felt the phone like a weight in his trouser pocket and shook his head.  There were still things Lestrade didn’t need to know.  “It was only a matter of time before her life caught up with her.  She’s made some powerful enemies and if they don’t want to be found, they won’t.”  He pushed passed Lestrade.  

“Now, if you don’t mind, I need to take John home.”

\--

Sociopath.  

The label read like an insult but to Sherlock it was an armor to wrap around his narrow frame, to protect the heart he had steadfastly buried beneath deductions and logic and steel, to hide his core.

The problem with Sherlock was not that he didn’t feel, but that he felt too much and that terrified him. So he adopted a mask that was as cold as he was warm and he wore it daily.  He went years without finding reason to remove it and then there came _John_.

Sherlock would do anything for him.

Sherlock had died for John.  Sherlock had killed for John.  Sherlock would toss his mask to the ground and let the world know how his insides were pieced together if that was what John wanted.

That was not what John wanted.

 


	2. Act I Scene ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright guys, Happy Friday! As promised, this chapter is much longer than the first and the rest will be of a similar length. I hope you enjoy~
> 
> (Also, as always, check the tags)

Sherlock sat opposite of John on the couch, his laptop balanced on crossed legs and his long fingers positioned over the keys.  The screen was scattered with notes and images in minimized boxes, evidence on a case that he really couldn’t pay attention to with John just sitting there, dead-eyed and a third of the way through a bottle of Macallan’s.   If he were honest with himself, Sherlock had prepared for sentimental ramblings, tears and heartbreak—if not for Mary than for the child lost—but he had not prepared for this.  He was not ready to deal with this John.

“She was leaving,” John said when the silence had dragged out to something taut and unsustainable.  His cheeks had darkened in a high flush and with his thumb he picked apart the green, slightly foiled label, shredding it from the glass in strips.  “I bet you knew that already, saw it in the state of the bedroom or by her underwear or something.”  John tilted the bottle up to his lips and swallowed deeply. “Doesn’t matter now.”

“There was a bag packed under the bed.” Sherlock confirmed.  Giving any concentration up for lost, he closed his laptop and placed it on the ground at his feet.  “I don’t understand why she was leaving, however. She had protection here, a family.”   _Of sorts_ , he managed not to say, lips souring around the thought.

“Child wasn’t mine, Sherlock.”  John laughed, the sound like a physical blow to the face, sharp and sudden.  “She told me just a couple days ago.  Some kind of retaliation for when I told her I figured out about the Moriarty video.”

Silence.

Sherlock held his hand out for the bottle and John handed it to him with something of a smug smile. An incongruous expression that slicked Sherlock’s stomach in an unease he tried to burn away with the whiskey. Not knowing how to approach the first statement, Sherlock decided to handle the second half.    “How did you figure that out?”

“I’m not blind, Sherlock. She needed you here, it made sense, you know?  What fool proof way was there to keep you in London instead of off dying somewhere—“ he waved his arms to indicate the world beyond their living space. “—else?  I just don’t get why…well, maybe I do get why.  I have a theory.”  John leaned in close and Sherlock mimicked the movement without thought, bottle pushing against his hand as it hit the couch.  “Mary was Moriarty’s, I dunno, me? You know, like a sidekick or whatever…am I your sidekick? I’m your blogger, that’s kind of like a sidekick.”  John stopped, lost in thought. A second later he shook his head and focused back on Sherlock. “Anyway, you’re the reason her employer’s dead, right?”

Nodding confirmation, Sherlock leaned back into his original space. He drank again from the bottle in hand.  John watched the movements expectantly.  Sherlock handed him the whiskey, coughing against the burn in his throat.  The unease still clung like oil.

“I think she had to have loved me at some point.  She couldn’t’ve known you were alive at first, you know, when she started going with me. So maybe she thought she’d take her revenge on me.  Not that she did anything… she was so perfect.”  John stared hard at the fireplace and his eyes were glassy, red.  Something dark was filling in the creases of his face, drawing his brow down in a heavy set of lines. He tried to laugh but the darkness deepened.  “A lot she could do once you came back.  Pretend to love me, lie, give me a child then take her away. Die.”

John rolled the bottle between his palms as he spoke, his eyes trained on the way the rapidly disappearing whiskey slid and sloshed about its cage.  Sherlock barely caught the tightening of tendons before the bottle sailed across the room, shattering into thousands of glittering pieces against the hearth.  Amber liquid pooled and glistened amongst the wreckage. The flames danced high like those of a steel furnace before settling back down to a smolder.

“She wasn’t supposed to be like that.”  John didn’t move—still had his arm outstretched in the line of the throw—but tears had finally gathered in the pits of his eyes.   When they tried to leak over he drew his arm in and cuffed them away.  “She was supposed to be normal.  We were going to have a baby girl, but even that’s tainted.  Another lie. We were nothing but lies.”  John let his head fall into the cradle of his knees, hiding his eyes.  Sherlock watched, unsure of what to do. So he kept silent as John’s shoulders heaved.

He almost missed the whispered words swallowed in denim.  They cracked the silence and his heart to pieces:

“She wasn’t supposed to be like you.”

\--

_I have a case that will interest you if you’re up to it_

The phone buzzing to life woke Sherlock from his kip on the sofa.  It had been a rough week since John broke the Macallan’s against the fireplace and the atmosphere of the flat had turned quiet and suffocating—a slow, constricting depression worming its way beneath Sherlock’s walls as he tried (and failed) to help John.  Mrs. Hudson attempted to reassure him, told him he was doing the best he could in a very tragic and trying situation, but _we can only wait and be here when John needs us. Right, dear?_  John, for his part, remained in his room with the exception of travel to the downstairs bathroom. He always shuffled listlessly and his face grew thicker and thicker with stubble as the days passed.  Sherlock left tea outside John’s door and take-away at meal times, but the tea was the only thing that ever disappeared; the food congealed and hardened—neglected—but Sherlock could think of nothing else to do.  So he continued.

The text was a bitter relief, a stab of thank-god-something-to-do and I-am-the-world’s-worst-friend as he relished the idea of leaving the flat.

As he tried to think of a way to reply to Lestrade—attempting to decide if he could leave John alone for a couple of hours or if he should try solving it over Skype—John came stumbling down the stairs, taking them two at a time in his rush; Sherlock jolted at the sudden outbreak of noise in the almost dead-thing quiet of the flat but he forced himself to look his usual calm-bored as John bounded into the living space.  

“Sherlock, I need out of this godforsaken flat,” John said without preamble. He was tugging at his hair as he approached, stiff-soft strands sticking up every-which way when he pulled his hands free.  “I’m going insane, I can’t sit around and think anymore or I’m likely to be sectioned.”

 _Perfect_.  It shouldn’t be.  Sherlock didn’t want to feel excited by John going so insane he needed out of the house, but the timing was perfect.

“Case?” Sherlock lifted the phone in his hand to show the brightly lit screen.  “Lestrade says it’s interesting.”

John visibly relaxed.  “Oh god yes.”

\--

The body sprawled out in the mud of the River Thames was the eighth in a long line of horrific kills.  Sherlock had the lot of them pinned and labeled across the far wall of his bedroom in a blood-grouted mosaic; clues and facts and missteps alike pieced together to form a whole he couldn’t bring into focus. It was a friendly thing, his company in the absence of John.

As John and he drew close, the scene blurred from a monochrome tableaux—black blood against LED white skin against silk grey grime—to something gruesome and gritty and not picturesque at all, not one bit.  John made a soft noise, tried to keep it trapped in the back of his throat but Sherlock could hear the disgust and unease and sympathy unsuccessfully choked back.

Sherlock had to admit the body was a particular mess, sectioned off as it was at the neck and shoulders and hips—five neat pieces bloating and peeling with early water damage. He should not have brought John here.

"It's him," Lestrade said as they met him at the blue and white police line.  His brow was pulled down in old stress, bags heavy beneath his dark eyes; he had been forced out of bed just two hours after falling into it (drank a beer to relax, drank a second to sleep and the yeast still remained at the corner of his mouth, the collar of his shirt).  There was something different about this body, something there to sour the DI's rather grey opinion of their Guardian Angel—  

Sherlock cringed away from the name, the sickly-sweet tang it left in the back of his throat.  Sentimental, idiotic, _humanizing_ —

"Him?"

Lestrade's eyes darted to John as if just now noticing him.  He probably had, probably hadn’t expected to see John out of the flat for awhile and certainly not at a crime scene.  His presence made Lestrade uneasy and he looked torn, weighing the option of being a good friend and sending John back home against needing help in a desperate case. His job won but his shoulders said he wasn't happy about the decision and would probably feel guilt for days over it.  He always felt guilt over something; it gave him an excuse to spend a night in his neighborhood pub.

Sherlock felt a twinge of the same unease, he probably should have insisted on a Skype call but—

"I'm not going to fall to pieces, you know," John said with his chin jutted out in challenge. He noticed the silence, the indecision; of course he did.  "This'll be good...something to keep me busy, yeah? Something familiar?” He shrugged. “Think of it as therapy."

"You have a really fucked up definition of therapy, mate," Lestrade said but his face was already just a bit less lined. John was good like that, knew what to say to people.

"Yeah, well, what do you expect, me living with this one and all?" John threw an affectionate look Sherlock’s way and Sherlock froze up for just a moment but then Lestrade was explaining the case to John and John had turned his attention back on the washed out DI.  He hadn’t seen affection from John since he asked Sherlock to give his best man speech—hadn’t seen that particular variation of affection since before he jumped from the roof of Barts.

Sherlock had to tune the two of them out, the way his heart suddenly bumped into overdrive.  He was thinking back to John’s stag night, the one when Sherlock’s cigarettes were found while Sherlock dropped to his knees and John stuffed his hands into the creases of his chair to ground himself, eyes lidded in drunk-lust and dark with something Sherlock thought only he had ever seen.

Blood tried to migrate south but Sherlock forced himself back into the present. He stared at the body sketched into the grey-toned shore, a vignette of potential.

_I am in trouble._

\--

Between the Unmasking of Mary and Christmas Day there had been a particularly interesting case.  Lestrade brought it to Sherlock after Sherlock had sent no less than 126 texts begging for something, _anything_ , to rid him of the boredom threatening to melt his brain from his ears.

Not quite allowed at crime scenes yet, Sherlock never saw the body at the original location. He did have a blurry, mediocre, useless—

He had a rough sketch of the scene from the forensic photos; Lestrade worked to have Sherlock consult in an official capacity but the red tape proved so very tedious. So in the meantime Molly kindly volunteered to meet with the two of them before she performed the autopsy.

“John not joining us?” Lestrade asked as they entered the morgue. The rubber seals of the door squeaked out their arrival.

Sherlock had not seen John in ages (one month, three days and seven hours...now going on eight).  Sherlock had sent countless texts over that span of time (357), of which none had been answered.  So he really didn’t know when he would see John again (“I need space, Sherlock. _Christ_ , this is just too…I just need space.”).  Molly waved a greeting from where she stood beside what remained of the body.

“No, he’s not.”

Sherlock stalked over to stand across from Molly, coat flaring briefly as he bent over the corpse and examined its wounds.  The accessories of its murder were spread neatly like an art installation beside it on the table. Sherlock catalogued where the bone gave way and skin tore from struggling and misuse. The lines of dissection interested him most.

The body sat vivisected on the table, skin peeled back neatly like a science-classroom dissection.  No organs were missing except for the genitalia cut clear away by a sharp blade.  The same blade that had been used to open up the abdomen and chest; the sternum lay split open by a bone saw, splinters raw and white against the red muscle tissue.  The killer had to have access to medical grade tools. He had to know how to handle them.

 _Cause of death_ : blow to the head by a steel ball-pein hammer found at the scene of the crime. The victim would have bled out no more than minutes after the blow occurred, making it a near thing.  Shock might have done it sooner.

“How’s the—?“  Lestrade gestured at Sherlock’s chest, at the still healing pucker of flesh beneath his crisp dress shirt. Sherlock scowled at the reminder and felt a twinge of pain shoot through him when his attention jerked to his transport.

Surprise, betrayal, hurt. They still lay in his bones.   

“The case, Lestrade.”  Sherlock had no intention of traveling down that trail of thought. He had already worn the path thin and bare and if he continued he would start searching for ways to erase it all.  His palms itched.

Sherlock bent further forward and inhaled; caught the copper tang of blood and beneath that tobacco, latex, rubbish.  The body had been found haphazardly shoved in a skip in the middle of the city with its head and shoulders crammed in and baring the brunt of the stench and weight; the killer wore gloves, the victim smoked…killer maybe smoked as well: there was a burn mark on victim’s upper left cheek from an ashed cigarette; definite malicious intent in the burn, the way it trailed when the victim had turned his head away from the pain.

“Right, you impatient bastard,” Lestrade grumbled as Sherlock looked for hidden clues.  Molly watched quietly, fidgeting with the clipboard she used to create a shield between herself and the rest of the world. “Meet Timothy Biggs. Arrested for possession of child pornography, sentenced to six months but slipped by with the minimum fine and slap on the wrist, two counts of sexual assault in the States and accused, but never convicted of, sexual assault against a minor. Well known by the media; he’s never tried to appear anything but unrepentant.  Got off on the attention, I think.”

Gripped tight in Biggs’ right hand were a handful of once pure white feathers, crushed and soiled with God knew what (blood, rubbish from the skip, cigarette ash—Pall Mall Red).  Upon closer inspection, Biggs’ hand was glued around the plumes, the skin peeling away where someone tried to uncurl his fingers with too much force.  Probably forensics being too enthusiastic with a piece of evidence; they seemed even more hopeless now that Anderson was gone.

If it were possible to bleach his brain, Sherlock would have done so for thinking something even close to favorable towards Anderson, but as it were he tried to delete, delete, delete.

“That explains the anger,” Sherlock straightened up and regarded Lestrade with a grim smile  “Your killer loathed this man, wanted to rid the world of him but not before he drew out every last bit of suffering he could.  He lost his temper before Biggs bled to death. Murdered probably twenty-four hours before being found in the skip. He was definitely placed there later, but how the killer managed to evade the CCTV and drag around the body…Actually, knowledge of the camera rotations would make that more than possible.  Killer skilled with medical equipment, indicates medical knowledge, hunting experience or extensive research; I suspect medical knowledge, the incisions having been done by a scalpel and they are neat, precise—a steady hand; not his first kill, definitely not his last.”

He looked back up at Lestrade. “You suspected this, which is why I’m here now.  How many others?”

“Five that we know of, two more that I think are related but don’t have the evidence to prove,” Lestrade said handing Sherlock the manila folder he had tucked under his arm.  “All seven victims are real national treasures, they are, but only five have the feather connection.  Four are sex offenders, the other three suspected killers in their own right—people we never could get a conviction to stick to.  They all had highly publicized cases.”

“How far back do the kills go?”

“Two years, give or take a few months,” Lestrade said, his shoulders slumping.  “I can’t prove those first two are connected yet.”

“ _Two years_?” Sherlock gaped, appalled.  “Even you can’t be that incompetent!”

“Yeah, well, it’s kinda hard to put a proper case together when we have someone taking the fall for each and every one of these bloody murders.”  Lestrade carded a hand through his hair, tugging the grey strands into disarray.  “I'll put money on some bit of evidence surfacing that implicates someone else for this murder.  Whether in the autopsy, or back at forensics or maybe it’ll just fall from the bloody sky.  These victims are so high fucking profile that it’s impossible to bloody breath without the chief superintendent pushing at us to wrap it up.  I know they’re connected but I can’t do anything about it when all everyone wants to do is take the easy way out and pretend we don’t have a bloody brilliant serial killer on the loose!”  Lestrade had his hands bunched in white-knuckled fists by his sides, jaw twitching as he clenched his teeth around a further rant. Sherlock frowned, opened his mouth to respond, thought better of the snark (John, look, tact), and closed it again.

“This should be interesting—I’ll take the case.”

\--

Lestrade had been right—partial fingerprints on the ball-pein hammer brought one of Biggs’ co-workers into suspect and upon searching his flat they found the bone saw and scalpel used to vivisect Biggs’ body tucked away behind the refrigerator.  Blood and bits of flesh still stuck to the saw and fingerprints were plastered over it despite both tools having been wrapped in a cleaning flannel.  Sherlock had not been allowed to search the man’s house himself, but after viewing the evidence he determined the scalpel found had never been used.

“Our killer has a favored weapon,” Sherlock said as he examined the silver blade through the evidence bag.  To the side, Donovan stood with her arms crossed tightly over her chest; she, like Lestrade, refused to let the possibility of a serial killer go even after convictions were made and the cases officially closed.  She did _not,_ however, approve of Sherlock’s presence.

“He kept the original scalpel and replaced it with one too short and too clean to have made the incision that split Biggs’ abdomen.”

“Not that I’m doubting you, but how do you figure that? He coulda been determined with that short blade there, cleaned it off afterwards.” Lestrade said, sipping coffee from the paper cup cradled in his hands.  He grimaced against the taste before removing the lid and downing what had to be the cold and sludge-like remains with grim resolve. “God, that was vile.” He screwed up his face dramatically before turning his full attention on Sherlock, looking rather relaxed for a man with a case quickly losing options.

“You saw the state of the bone saw.  It was a mess, meant to look like the killer was negligent, passionate. But the scalpel had been thoroughly cleaned.  So thoroughly I would think it had actually been taken from the packaging directly before being placed in the bag with the bone saw.  Our killer picked a good scapegoat.  Biggs’ co-worker—“

“Tomas Bridge,” Lestrade supplied.

“—was vocal in his dislike of Biggs,” Sherlock continued, ignoring Lestrade.  “He did what he could to avoid overlapping shifts with him at the petrol station.  Needed the money desperately, so he couldn’t quit; but he was searching for employ elsewhere before he was arrested.  It’s obvious that he doesn’t know a thing about medical equipment. He didn’t even make it through university.  He’s a recovering alcoholic; his hands shake far too much to have made the clean lines we saw on Biggs’ body. However, if you search his web history you will find that an order was made for both the bone saw and a set of scalpels in his name and with his credit card.”

“Sounds like he’s pretty much fucked,” Lestrade hummed, calm enough that Sherlock actually looked up from his examinations to stare openly, ignoring the physical evidence in favor of the DI.

“You don’t care about proving his innocence,” Sherlock stated after a moment of silence.  Donovan, who had been drifting off in the corner snapped awake, eyes narrowed in interest.  Lestrade shrugged.

“You know something about the suspect I don’t.”  Sherlock cursed his inability to question the man himself—he had so little to go off of as it was (paper transcripts, mostly, and a stolen copy of the interview itself as well as the basic information he could get from the internet). Lestrade shrugged again, examining his phone like a teenager caught out in a secret.

“Sir, what do you know?” Donovan said when it became obvious Lestrade would keep tight-lipped without prompting.

“Well, he’s a bit of a prick, now isn’t he?” Lestrade snapped finally, looking up from his phone with not an ounce of guilt in his expression.  “Beat his wife bloody so many times the operators at the station knew his daughter’s voice without ever needing to ask.  The woman finally had enough sense to divorce him after he started hitting on the girl. She never pressed charges, though, the idiot.”

That would explain a lack of information on the Internet.

“Domestic abuse isn’t your jurisdiction.”

“No, but that woman was my wife’s old boss.  Heard all about it when me and her were still on talking terms.”  

“That’s awful and everything,” Donovan said slowly, like she was trying to think of a way to word what she said next without causing offense.  “But he doesn’t deserve to take the fall for a murder he didn’t commit.”

“If you ask me, he deserves worse.”

“That’s not your job to decide,” Sherlock said, grudgingly agreeing with Donovan.  “Him taking the fall for Biggs’ murder does nothing to move the case forward.”

“Doesn’t move it back either.  Ignore him and we can focus all of our attention on our serial killer.  Our little guardian angel.” He snorted a quick laugh and went back to his phone; Donovan hesitated but then decided to keep her mouth screwed shut around her dissent. She tapped out of the conversation and settled back into her corner for the long haul. This left Sherlock in relative peace to peruse through the evidence spread about the table.

It was all rather neat; each piece laid out incriminated Bridge—simple yet effective.  If given enough time, Sherlock believed he could put together a case that would both prove Bridge’s innocence and the existence of their serial killer beyond a doubt, but…he didn’t.  Lestrade was right, it would slow them down.  Instead, he pulled aside the most pertinent pieces of evidence, snapping pictures for his wall back at 221B. He ignored the rest.

He would claim that he kept his deductions to himself to keep further involvement of the police to a minimum, and would say just that in the near future when asked (‘your people are incompetent and it’s not like anyone of value was being detained.”) but it wouldn’t be the truth.  Not quite.

\--

Millie Newport, or the pieces of her neatly bloating on the thick shore mud, was not their killer's usual victim.  Sherlock flitted from arm to leg to head, trying to find a way that she connected but all he saw were the things that made her different: bruises old and yellowing around her neck and arms, heavy foundation worn away by the rising river tide revealing more bruising at the left cheek bone and beneath the fringe of hair plastered to her forehead; her nose previously broken at least once and set poorly; the angle it sat on her face crooked and aesthetically displeasing. She had suffered an abusive relationship before she found herself at the mercy of the killer Sherlock and Lestrade had come to understand. Had tried to understand.

Who they obviously had never really understood.

"Poor girl," John murmured as he squatted down to get a closer look.  He examined the flesh at her right shoulder and then at her neck, looking at the neat places limb and head had been removed from trunk, his medical mask placed firmly over his humanity.  "This was done professionally," he said pointing at the incisions. "There is a little bit of pooling that suggests the body was moved here before rigor set in and the blood coagulated—it's hard to tell though, the river has washed a lot of it away.  I'd say time of death was about ten or twelve hours ago?"  He looked at Sherlock as if for confirmation, but he was spot on.  Sherlock felt a little warm at how proficient John had become at deductions, at how quickly he picked up clues.

"Cause of death is that lovely crater she's got knocked into the side of her head," Lestrade said from his position several paces away.  His face paled ashen in the LED lighting; weary, angry lines sat there in sharp relief like the elevation contours of a topographic map. "Same as Biggs."

"Good news, then." Sherlock grabbed a spongy wrist between two fingers, sneering at the forensic tech who squawked at him about gloves—what was the point, her body had been wiped clean of any prints by a meticulous hand and the Thames, Sherlock’s fingerprints wouldn't make a bit of difference.

He saw exactly what he had expected—a fistful of white feathers.  However, unlike the ones found on Biggs, these had roughly kept their shape and color and when Sherlock pressed a finger to them they were waxy to the touch. Intentionally preserved. "He killed her before cutting her up. A show of mercy."

Lestrade pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closed as he inhaled and then exhaled deeply.  "Why her?"

"I don't know," Sherlock said as he jack-knifed up in a sudden burst of energy, hands in his hair, mindlessly carding Thames and Millie into the curls. "He made sure to protect the integrity of the feathers—a tribute to her innocence, maybe? He's intentionally showing she's different but I don't know why.  Is she high profile like the rest?  What about her partner?"

"Her partner?"  

"Yes, her partner—she has bruising consistent with an abusive relationship.  He'll be the one taking the fall for her murder this time."

"I suppose that's one way to get him to suffer," John said as he finally stood and slogged over to Sherlock and Lestrade, mud sucking hungrily at his feet.  "The boyfriend or whoever, that is.  Frame him for murder and he won't see the light of day for a long time."

"But why change his MO now?" Lestrade demanded. He felt responsible, it projected loudly from the hunch of his shoulders.  Betrayal set his feet wide, his arms heavy over his chest; he was upset as he watched the situation crumble.  Like there could have been any other outcome.  

"I don't know, but he's far from done."

"Of course not. He's fooled us this long, why stop now?"  Lestrade scuffed the ground with his boot, mud coating the sleek black.  “Anything else?”

“No.  Text me when you find the evidence implicating the boyfriend.”

“Yeah, sure.”  Lestrade turned and walked away.  As they follow, Sherlock caught John tilting his head to the side, face perturbed but the creases still set mostly to neutral, professional mask still guarding him from reaction.  It dropped into something more John-like when he noticed Sherlock frowning.

Sherlock really shouldn't have brought him.


	3. Act I Scene iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you [Teh Kita](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Teh_Poet/pseuds/Teh_Poet) for reading through and giving this a once over before I posted it! 
> 
> CHAPTER WARNING: This chapter is very much the reason for the body horror and graphic gore warnings on this story, so proceed with a bit of caution if your get squicked easily.
> 
> Other than that, Happy Friday and I will see you in a couple of weeks!

 John didn't squirrel himself away as soon as they got back to the flat, which surprised Sherlock. Instead John hung his coat and kicked off his shoes like he used to as a regular tenant of 221B, moving slowly with the deliberate motions of the tired.  After stationary mourning, the three hours out seemed to have drained whatever energy had propelled John from bed earlier that night and moved him through the early morning hours they had now crept into.  He did not turn to take the stairs to his room.

"So this case has been going on awhile?" John asked after they had stepped into the warmth of their flat.  Sherlock nodded and then made a beeline for the kitchen to rummage around for a clean kettle; John wandered over to his chair falling into it heavily; the legs creaked out protest against the sudden weight.   

"According to Lestrade, over two years.  Well, I suppose it’s been closer to three, now." Sherlock had to raise his voice over the noise of his search, making a small hum of triumph when he finally found everything he needed for tea.  

“You and Lestrade were pretty familiar with the killer, yeah?”

"Yes, I suppose we are.  There's no official case, though.  Each murder is examined, blame tacked onto a ready-made suspect and then the idiots at Scotland Yard move on. The victims are always incredibly high profile."  

Sherlock dropped tea sachets into the mugs liberated from the cupboards. Pouring in the boiled water, he watched as brown blossomed out like creeping blood diffusing and staining the liquid until it became something no longer recognizable for what it had once been. Sherlock then doctored each cup before bringing them into the living space: milk, no sugar for John and in his two sugars, no milk.

“And because they’re so high profile, no one wants to mess with the media fallout when a killer isn’t found.”  Sherlock continued, handing a mug to John. He seated himself on the back of his own chair, balancing his mug on one knee. “Now we’re playing a fun game of whodunit. Bridge killed Biggs’ with the bone saw in the alleyway. Thug boyfriend killed Millie with a hatchet on the Thames.  Well, it was a hammer in both cases, and the murders didn’t _actually_ occur at the places the bodies were found at, but a hatchet and bone saw sound more interesting.  And don’t all the weapons have to be different in that stupid game of yours?”

“You mean Cluedo?” John’s lips spasmed upward, a ghost of a smile trying to make itself known as he took a sip of tea.  Sherlock’s stomach warmed a bit.  “Person, place and thing—that’s how it goes.”

“Right, so, these murders are playing out smoothly like that game—“

“Sherlock, I don’t think you understand the rules of Cluedo—“

“Whatever, the rules are stupid.”  Sherlock scoffed, waving his free hand around as if to clear the air of something distasteful. This time he managed to draw a laugh out of John, a soft huff of breath through the nose. Sherlock smiled around the rim of his mug and drew in a sweet mouthful of tea before continuing. “These murders are not.  They’re rather clever, actually.  Simple, but clever.”

“They’d have to be if they have you stumped.”  John downed the rest of his tea and stood.  “You’ll have to tell me more tomorrow, er, today?  Maybe we can get dinner.”  He smiled warmly at Sherlock, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“If Lestrade needs me—“

“You’ll still have to eat.”

“Only if you do.  Eat that is.”  Sherlock glared rather pointedly at the sag in John’s jumper and John looked away, abashed.

“Yeah, I can live with that.  Good night Sherlock.”  John left, taking his mostly full mug and dropping it in the sink before he headed up the stairs.

Sherlock for his part tried to handle the sudden heat throbbing along the lining of his stomach.  It was pointless.

 

\--

 

Sherlock and John never made it to dinner that night.  Lestrade got to them first.

Instead they found themselves in the middle of an abandoned carpark, ground crawling with forensic technicians and LED lights, cold biting harder now that they’d been without food for a good 12 hours; Sherlock’s stomach growled.

“It’s her brother, not her lover.”  Lestrade said, handing Sherlock and John a pair of latex gloves.  Sherlock glared at them with distaste.  “Put them on, Sherlock.  I let you get away with it at the river ‘cause it really didn’t matter, but it does here and you know how hard I had to work to get you off the superintendent’s shit list.”

Sherlock scowled, but pulled them on to the sound of John sniggering.  “My money is still on him being her _partner_.”

“Still on him being—I really don’t want to think about that,” the DI said, rubbing his hands over his face; his own gloves stuck to his skin, distending his expression dramatically.   “Anyway, we found a wallet on the corpse with Jeremy Newport’s credentials, but we’re still waiting on forensics to confirm.”

“What happened to his face?”  John said as they approached the lone Ford Focus, silver paint glistening brightly in the lights.  Wet black shone against the asphalt, a puddle fed by the liquid red dripping from the open driver’s side door.  “Oh.”

“Yeah, I had to take advantage of the trash bin over—“ John rushed in the direction Lestrade had indicated and the sound of retching broke the work-time murmur.

Sherlock found bile clawing up his own esophagus, but managed to quell it as he drew within a meter of the body.  “This was caused by…a bit more excessive violence than our killer usually indulges in.”

The face was unrecognizable as such—mouth caved in and missing most of its teeth, nose smashed flat and eye sockets completely collapsed—it had to have taken considerable strength to do that much damage.  Sherlock stepped in as close as the pool of blood would allow him.  The corpse had its arms extended and its hands clamped tightly against the steering wheel, white and matted feathers peeking out from beneath the palms.  Sherlock would bet good money they were glued to the leather.  This was definitely their Guardian Angel.

“He doesn’t usually kill the scapegoat,” Lestrade said from a good distance back.  He looked ill and kept staring longingly at the bin John still hovered around.  “Why would he kill the scapegoat?”

“He’s changing his pattern,” Sherlock said.  If he pulled back far enough the corpse looked faceless, blood and pulpy tissue completely obscuring any human features.  A monster.  “Our killer has been fond of scalpels in the past—are there any incisions?  Maybe under his clothes?”

“I don’t think they’ve checked—“

“Oi, get back from that!”  Sherlock startled away from where he had bent in near to the body, hand outstretched to pull back the blood-heavy shirt.  Sergeant Donovan approached him on flat feet, arms crossed over her chest as usual.  “You’ll contaminate it.”

Sherlock held up his hands.  “I’m wearing gloves.”

“Shoes aren’t covered.”  She approached the car and pulled Sherlock further away by his coat.  “Inspector Lestrade, control your detective, we’ve not even started photographing yet.”

“Come off it, Donovan—“

“Procedure, Freak,” She said, hands on hips.  “You’ve got to follow procedure or you’re not allowed on site anymore, remember that.”

“How delightful.”  Sherlock scowled but gave arguing up as a lost cause, more in favor of tracking down John.  “Yell for me if you find anything interesting.  I’m going to check on John.”

“Ta.”  Lestrade waved him off before turning to a petite technician that had come up to the car toting a hefty camera.  Sherlock sniffed and turned on his heel, gravel crunching beneath the expensive sole as he searched out John.  He must have wandered away from the trash bin and gone to walk off the shock of the scene.  “John?”

“Over here, Sherlock.”  John stood up from behind a patrol car, wobbling slightly on his feet as he did.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to vanish on you—Got a bit dizzy.”

“You should go home.”  Sherlock pursed his lips as he looked his friend up and down—he had bags under his eyes dark as bruises and his skin bled sallow beneath the tan.  He was exhausted.  “You need to eat.”

“I’ll eat when we both leave here.  It’s early enough, I’m sure Angelo would secure a table.”  He smiled.  “Besides, you’re just as hungry.”

“You just left what little you had in your stomach in the bin. I’ve at least kept my toast down.  Honestly, John, you’re supposed to be a—“

“ _Jesus fucking Christ!_ ”

“ _Someone call paramedics.  Christ, fuck!_ ”

“ _How is he still alive!?_ ”

John shoved past Sherlock, rushing towards the shouting before Sherlock could turn around and do the same.  The car had a small gathering of technicians around it with Donovan and Lestrade at the center shouting orders.  John pushed through, _I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor_ , working like a battering ram to part through the frightened people.  Sherlock caught up and took his place by Lestrade, bile making itself known again, refusing to let him take a step forward.

It played out like a page from a horror story, the way Jeremy jerked against his bound hands, blood bubbling and popping as he forced air through his ruined mouth.  A terrible moaning cry rose from his throat, gargling out like tar through the congealed blood; a tooth dribbled over his bottom lip as he pushed his tongue out to clear the way for breath; his head lolled from side to side as he tugged at the wheel. Sherlock could see the skin peel back, fresh blood coating the crusted palms, feathers fluttering everywhere as John tried to calm him until a paramedic could get there.  It wasn’t working.

“Jeremy, Jeremy calm down.”  Jeremy struggled harder, blood hitting John’s clothing, his hands, his face.  One hand broke free, leaving skin and blood and feathers behind and it moved, sluggish and shaking, to push John away.  The wet groaning grew frantic, boiling deep in Jeremy’s throat until it sounded like he was choking.  John gripped the man’s wrist, ignoring the blood now coating his jumper and with his free hand he tried to hold Jeremy down against the seat.  

It was too late.  

Jeremy convulsed and keened low until his body went still, claimed by death once more.

“Oh god,” one technician gasped as another tried not to sob.  In the distance sirens wailed.  It took a moment before Lestrade snapped back to attention, face green but set with determination.

“Alright! I need all of you to move away from the car—this is still an active crime scene and I can’t have you contaminating it anymore than you have.”  His voice dragged a bit, sticking against his gullet but it proved enough to get everyone moving.  Sherlock went to John.

“John?”  John looked up, face spattered in blood.  His eyes stared blank even as his brow drew down, disturbed.

“Sherlock, look.”  He said, and Sherlock glanced past John to the body still held up by John’s bare hand, saw the way the shirt rucked up over its abdomen and then the neat, carved lines in the flesh.  Blood smeared them from the fabric and thrashing, but the cuts still remained clear enough to read.

_I BELIEVED IN SHERLOCK HOLMES_

This time, Sherlock was going to be sick.

 

\--

 

“Who do you know who would’ve done something like _that_?” 

Lestrade had Sherlock locked in his office with John sat off to one side nursing a cup of coffee. Donovan towered to the other with her arms crossed neatly over her chest, always in a position of defense. John had washed off most of the blood, but what clung to his jumper and shoes permeated the room as a cloying, copper reminder of the crime scene they just left.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s obviously someone who hates you, Freak.”

“Don’t call him that.”  John’s hands tightened around his cup, crinkling the paper.

“Could be anyone, couldn’t it?” Donovan continued, tone antagonistic.  Sherlock could feel a headache start to throb behind his temples

“Lay off, Sally.” John bristled stiff and tight, ready to strike.

“It’s true, though.  He’s not well liked, is he?”

Lestrade slammed his palms hard against his desk, papers shifting and fluttering in agitation. “Would you two behave?  We have enough to deal with right now without you picking at each other!” He offered a glare to both John and Donovan before exhaling sharply.  He slumped back into his chair and ran both hands through his hair and over his face.   Turning back to Sherlock: “Are you sure you can’t think of someone, _anyone_?”

“All my known enemies are dead.” Sherlock said, tone so flat and cold the room stopped moving.  He would know, would know so intimately it took a guarded effort to clear his mind of spider fingers digging deep into the delicate cords of a throat, of punching a syringe into belly fat, of snapping a neck.  His fingers itch at his side.  “I could have others, but these murders started after I feigned my death.  He wasn’t an enemy of mine until recently.”

“Copycat?”  John said, placing his ruined cup on the table.  It teetered and then fell over, the base too crumpled to hold it; a small amount of coffee and cream oozed onto the wooden surface and Sherlock watched as it spread and absorbed into the scattered mess of papers.  No one else noticed.

“How?  This case doesn’t technically exist,” Lestrade said, voice raising in pitch. “No real details have been released to the press.”

“Could be someone inside the department?”

“I really don’t want to think about that.”

Sherlock scoffed. Lestrade glared.

“His style was considerably more violent than last time,” Sherlock said, folding his hands prayer-like beneath his chin.   “But it was still the same type of hammer, same feathers, same scalpel used.  Something’s happened recently that’s made him angry.”

“A client you failed?”  John tried again.  The suggestion stung a bit, but Sherlock shook his head.

“There’s no one I could have made this angry.”

“A client you turned away?”

“I took all the interesting cases.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, Sherlock, you _know_ that. You could have ignored an e-mail from someone unstable.”

“But why start now?  I’ve been back over a _year_. Could have started with Timothy Biggs’, or Millie Newport.  They all happened after I returned.  Or why start killing in the first place—why start after I died if I’m the reason.”  Sherlock bit back a frustrated growl.  “No, this kill is an outlier.  I need more evidence before I can make any sort of deduction.”

Lestrade groaned, defeated.  “Christ, this has gotten to be a mess.”

“I wonder whose fault that is?” Donovan turned on Lestrade and Sherlock saw that going to hell quickly.

“Oh, don’t start with me.”

“Can we go?” John asked, tapping his foot rapidly against the floor, face thunderous.

Lestrade shot a warning glare Donovan’s way before answering. “Why not? Until forensics runs through everything, I’ve got nothing else for you.”

Sherlock looked to John and held out his hand to help him from his chair.  “Home?”

“Please.”

The sound of whispered bickering followed them out the door.

 

_End Act I_


	4. Act II Scene i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is very domestic, I don't know if that's a warning or a relief for you guys but I hope you enjoy nonetheless!
> 
> Happy Friday y'all and see you in two weeks!

Sherlock slid into the cab and shut the world out.

_I BELIEVED IN SHERLOCK HOLMES_

It made no sense; there was no one left that hated him to such a degree.  The very last person was Mary and she would soon be rotting in a grave—

_Oh god, Mary._

“The funeral, John, what about Mary’s funeral?”  John slowly turned to regard Sherlock.

“It’s taken care of.” John shrugged, eyes a hollow slate in the dark cab. A long moment of silence, then: “I didn’t spend all that time in my room sleeping.” He turned to look back out the window.  “What’s got you on about that?”

“She was the last one,” Sherlock said as if that explained everything.  John’s shoulders tensed and Sherlock huffed.  “The last person who could have hated me so, John.”

 _All the rest are dead._ Dark thoughts lay down that path; phantom warmth against his cheek and pain against his back and black nights with no sleep.  He shuddered, body jolting against the door he leaned on; he forced his mind to focus on the immediate present. His stomach growled, a low rumble he felt more than heard.

“We should stop for food.”

“Sherlock, I don’t think I’m—“

“You need to eat.  It’s been a week since you’ve had anything solid—Your jumper doesn’t fit right and the bruises under your eyes are much too dark.”

“I had toast before we left.”

“And it’s now resting at the bottom of a bin at a crime scene.”

“I really don’t think I’m up for food right now.”

“I’ll eat as much as you do.”  John actually stopped to consider that.  It rang as an echo of the promise made earlier that day.  

That seemed like years ago.

“If I eat a whole meal, you will too?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it slows down your thinking.”

“Yes, John.”

“Fine, but please let’s call in for take-away.  I just want to get back to the flat.”

Sherlock acquiesced, settling back into his seat to spend the rest of the ride decidedly not thinking over the demons in his head.

John never looked away from the window.

\--

John escaped to the shower as soon as they entered the flat.  It took him maybe five minutes to rinse off, but when he came out he had his clothes wrapped in a bag and his hips in a towel.  

“I’m binning these.” He said but Sherlock hardly paid any attention.  John had certainly lost weight but the loss of fat only seemed to harden the plains of his stomach, his chest.  Had he always had so much definition beneath those jumpers?  

“That’s probably for the best.” Sherlock said before ducking into the kitchen to hide the blush heating his cheeks.

Sherlock had started tea brewing when John returned from his room.  He called for Thai as Sherlock watched the water come to a boil, tiny bubbles forming at the bottom of the electric kettle before erupting into life, disturbing the surface with roiling energy.

Sherlock had settled back into his thoughts while John dressed.

He tried to think, tried to come up with some reason his name had been carved into the most recent corpse, but nothing revealed itself.  Two years and the killer hadn’t made any indication that these bodies existed for Sherlock, that they were because of him.

The kettle hissed and screamed.  Sherlock flipped the switch and started searching for mugs.  Not finding any in the usual place, he washed the two in the sink from earlier and they clattered as he placed them on the counter.  Two bags whispered to the bottom of the mugs.

He would have to look at this case from a completely different angle.  Sift through years of evidence to see just where he fit in, find what parts seemed to be directed at him to notice.  Currently he could think of nothing.

Sherlock poured hot water over each tea bag, slowly letting the liquid murmur its way to a knuckle’s width beneath the rim of each cup; soft tendrils of brown staining their way into clear heat. He stood, neck bent over the mugs to watch the tea diffuse and blend away into a solid mahogany brown.

Out of sight, John disconnected from the phone, footsteps heavy as he wandered into the sitting room and fell onto the couch with an audible _whump._  The television came to life shortly after, the muted sounds of audience laughter filling the silence that had settled in.

They lived in so much silence.

Sherlock opened the fridge in search of milk, finding instead several six-packs of beer crammed into the small space.  He pulled one pack out, placed it on the table with a rattling clang and then bent back into the cold space, shifting things aside until he found the milk.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock poured milk into one mug, mahogany shifting and become pale, creamy.  He placed the carton back, left the beer out, and slammed the stainless-steel door shut.

“Sherlock?”

He placed sugar in the darker tea and gathered both up in one hand.  His brain clicked and whirred as it tried to sort through names.  Couldn’t be Moriarty, he was definitely dead.  Couldn’t be his many minions, Sherlock has disassembled the web, the last thread snapping apart with the force of the bullet ending Mary Watson’s life.  Not Magnussen, either.  His people couldn’t have cared less about the man himself.  Just the money.

Not quite thinking, Sherlock slipped the long fingers of his free hand into the plastic loops binding the beer together and made his way into the living area.  He placed the beer on the table first before handing a mug to John, who took it—face folded in with concern.

“Sherlock?  Oi!”  John stuck out a hand and grabbed onto Sherlock’s shirtsleeve before Sherlock could sit, the physical contact snapping him back to reality with a jolt.  The tea sloshed in his grip, hot liquid burning his hand as he tried to set it down without further incident.

“Christ, sorry!”  John placed his own mug on the coffee table and hopped up from his seat.  “I’ll grab a cloth from the kitchen, I didn’t mean to startle you—“

“It’s alright, I’m fine.”  Sherlock wiped the liquid on his trouser leg, no regard for the material, and fell back onto the couch.  John sat back down as well, leaning forward to grab the tea he had just abandoned.  He pulled the beer closer as well, but left it at the edge for the moment.

“Where’d you go? Didn’t seem mind-palace-y wherever it was.”  Sherlock scrunched up his nose at the word choice, but decided not to comment.

“Just thinking.”

He looked at the surface of his tea, really looked and took in every imperfection and pockmark of the porcelain mug, the tiny particles of tea and the almost oily swirls of not-quite-dissolved sugar.  Tilted at the right angle he could catch bits of his reflection: a sharp cheek bone here, pursed bottom lip there.  He looked exhausted, even to himself.

Sherlock pulled back to reality as John looked around, face scrunched to the side as he fished for something to say.  His eyes caught on the beer and he pointed.

“I have never seen you go near a can of beer in all the time I’ve know you, where’d that come from?”

“The fridge.”

“Ha ha.  No, really.  Did you buy it?”

“There’s more in there.”  Sherlock didn’t really want to recount his misadventure at the corner TESCO; how the long aisle of beers and ciders had meant nothing to him but could possibly mean something to John.  He must have deleted the logo color of what John used to drink. He only knew it came in a can because it took up so much space in their refrigerator. Now there were six different types in there because Sherlock had grown frustrated.

“There’s more in the….Sherlock, how much did you buy?”  The skin around John's eyes crinkled with amusement.

“Look, I thought you could use it, but I didn’t remember what you used to drink before and I won’t be doing it again after that idiotic teller insisted I give him the location of the party I was buying for.” Sherlock slumped back, almost spilling his tea again.  “If you don’t like any of them, I’m sure Stamford or Lestrade would appreciate free alcohol.  There’s whiskey in the cupboards.”

John eyed him, eyes still crinkled like he would start laughing any moment, but he didn’t.  Instead, he placed his tea onto the table and replaced it with two of the beers.  “Cheers then.” He held one out.

“I don’t drink beer.”  Except when John asked.

“You do tonight.  Maybe a little alcohol will jog something loose.”

“Unlikely.”  Sherlock took the can anyway.  

“You never know.”  John pulled from his can.

“Ineffective.” Disastrous.  Sherlock rolled the can between his palms, coating them in condensation, paying no mind when the moisture gathered and dripped off the edge of his hands, the tips of his fingers.  

He was remembering another time.

John’s stag night, the one Sherlock fortified behind protective walls in his mind.  The one where he drank and drank and drank and ended up in a drunk tank for the effort, thoughts muddled and thick.

But before.

Before that, soft whiskey hues and blood-heated words leading to tentative touches, low-lidded looks; spread legs and sticky leather.  Sherlock often lost himself in the snapshots.

_“This is a bad idea.”_

_“Very.”_

_John traced the lines of Sherlock’s abdomen with sloppy kisses and tongue strokes that painted a watercolor mess over the sharp plains of skin._

_“We should stop.”  Sherlock didn’t want to stop.  His body revolted at the very idea but his mind railed and shrieked into the alcohol pall stretched loose and hazy across heavy-lidded eyes._

_“We should.”  John didn’t stop._

_The world tilted and swirled together in dark colors that sparked every time John pressed teeth to sensitive flesh, calluses to fair skin.  Sherlock slid, back aching from the sprawl he’d fallen into on the leather chair but he didn’t dare move more, not an inch.  He couldn’t scare away the alcohol dream of John sliding ever south, he wouldn’t.  John’s lips wrapped like silk suction against the head of his cock and Sherlock saw the flames of hell flare bright in their hearth before squeezing his eyes shut._

_Against his blood-pink lids those flames burned bright and inviting and Sherlock dived right in._

“Did I lose you again?”  John said.  The couch sunk as he settled back in, the smell of Thai thick in the air, blended over notes of black tea and hops.  

The beer in his hand had warmed, the light outside had changed.  Heat rose in his cheeks, spread across his chest but he shook his head.  “No, I’m here.”

“Mm-hm.”  John leaned over, took the can from Sherlock’s fingers and replaced it with one cold and sweaty. “Drink it this time.  I’m already one up on you.”

Sherlock cracked the aluminum tab without a word and drank deep.  

“You have to eat too.”

“I know.”  Sherlock wanted the escape of his room, but instead he grabbed a plastic container of curry, rice already dropped into the creamy green contents.  He didn’t eat until John had his own container in hand. The food tasted like thick nothing but he forced it down.  When he took a sip of beer, he was surprised to suck in the dregs—can light and empty as he placed it on the table.

John already had one held out.  That disappeared almost as fast; cheap alcohol at least good to wash down the tasteless food.  John kept pace and they ate in silence.

The six pack vanished before the food and a second one took its place on the coffee table, offering assistance when Sherlock couldn't quite swallow.

"Well,"  John said placing his take-away container down. "One meal at a time."

Sherlock nodded. He wanted a cigarette.  The room tilted a bit, but the buzz, buzz, buzzing in his brain had slowed to a murmur easy to tune away. He smiled.

"Doing any better?" John barely looked affected by the alcohol, just a slight pink in his cheeks giving him away.

Sherlock nodded again and slouched into the couch cushion, legs spread out wide. He placed his own empty food container on the floor and took another drink.

John shifted a bit and Sherlock realized how close together they sat. _When did that happen?_ He could feel the heat of John's thigh not quite touching his own. It made his skin tight and itchy with anticipation.  He fiddled with the tab of his beer and tried to keep his body loose even as ants crawled beneath his skin, little feet coaxing him to move.

"Do you want to watch something?"

John stared at the muted telly, remote in hand as he flipped through channels.

Sherlock nodded again, drank more of his beer and forgot why he felt tension tightening in his shoulders.

They passed the rest of the evening in silence.

\--

A small part of Sherlock enjoyed being drunk.  That same part also enjoyed heroin and sex with strangers in dark rooms; enjoyed losing a strain of thought to sensation.

Sherlock had gone five years without indulging that part before John’s stag night—now he couldn’t even make it a year.  The Guardian Angel, Mary’s death, John’s grief...

_I BELIEVED IN SHERLOCK HOLMES_

This case merited an escape.  No one could deny that, not really.

However, waking up in bed with his head throbbing and tongue thick from drink, nestled in next to a certain best friend because of indulging that small part?  That was a bit not good.

Sherlock froze, a visceral panic-reaction as he catalogued the world around him.  He was in his bed stripped to his pants; John, more modestly dressed in his day clothes, slept on his back and there existed almost a body’s worth of space between the two of them, but given their history—

“Don’t worry.”  John shifted and exhaled before he sat up.  “We didn’t sleep together, at least not in the way you’re thinking.”

Sherlock told himself he only felt relief.

On the nightstand he saw a glass of water and gratefully reached for it, sitting up just enough to keep from spilling its contents. When he put the glass back he noticed two paracetamol and—his head giving a ill-timed kick—he grasped at them and swallowed them dry.

“Why are you in my bed?”

John laughed, then winced at the sound.  “You got properly sozzled so I was worried you might vomit in your sleep.  I wanted to make sure you made it through the night. Must have dozed off at some point.”

“Thank you.”  

“Well, can’t have you dying, now can we?”  John slid his legs over the edge of the bed and stood. “Not like that. I can see the headlines now: The Great Sherlock Holmes chokes and dies on vomit after binge drinking beer and watching bad telly.  How average.”

Sherlock chuckled even as nausea flared in his stomach.   

“I’m gunna start something to eat, you should shower. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Fine.”  Sherlock groaned and nestled further into his pillow.  John laughed.

“That doesn’t mean go back to sleep.  We’ve got a case to work on.”

Images from the crime scene the day before bubbled up to the surface and Sherlock bolted from his bed, barely making it the bathroom to vomit.

He thought he heard John laughing outside the door, but decided to blame it on to his alcohol-beaten brain playing a cruel joke.

\--

It took a couple of hours for Sherlock to feel himself again.

During that time John had tried to force Sherlock to eat a proper fry up. He eventually settled on toast just so long as _you at least eat a bit of jam, you need the calories._

“So, that’s quite a collection you’ve got pinned up in your room,” John said over his tea. They had moved into the living space once Sherlock had finally swallowed the last of his toast, John settling easily into his chair and Sherlock collapsing onto the couch.  The smell of eggs and bacon still hung in the air, making his stomach turn and complain.  John had the paper spread across his knees and Sherlock tried to decide if he wanted to risk vomiting again if he moved to open the window.

“It was something to keep me occupied,”  Sherlock said and decided he had to risk it.  The stench was too much.   “Now it’s a bloody nightmare.”

_I BELIEVED IN SHERLOCK HOLMES._

He stuck his head out the window and inhaled the cold London air.

“I couldn’t make heads or tails of it last night,” John continued, smiling knowingly at Sherlock when he withdrew back into the flat. “Do you want to go over it with me, maybe I can help?”

“Mmm.”  Sherlock hummed agreement but he didn’t think it would make a bit of difference.


	5. Act II Scene ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this is late, but at least I still made it on the day I promised to, right? So I guess it's technically not late...
> 
> We have sex this chapter! I added tags for it and it is plot important and it's part of the reason this chapter took so long to write. The next chapter is where everything begins to spiral.
> 
> Also! I will be at 221B Con! If you'd like to meet up, hit me up on tumblr (link at the end of the chapter) or come here me talk at y'all on the fan art panel! (Still can't believe I'm a panelist!)
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy--this wasn't beta'd before hand because my beta was very busy and I might have just sent her text yelling YOLO I'M POSTING because I'm a bit of an impatient dork.
> 
> See you in two weeks!

“After getting through the mess we all made of the crime scene,” Lestrade started, holding out coffees to John and Sherlock as they met him at the entrance to NSY.  Sherlock sniffed his and then swapped with John.  Lestrade snorted. “You know you look like a married couple when you do shit like that, right?”

Sherlock scoffed. “We don’t.”

“We kind of do, Sherlock.”  

Lestrade snickered before continuing.  “Anyway. After getting through that mess of a crime scene, forensics has found our killer.”

“Oh, really?”  Sherlock said, his tone saying just how laughable he found that.

“Mm-hmm.  It can really only be one guy!” Lestrade paused dramatically. Sherlock rolled his eyes at the obvious theatrics but John had perked up with interest. “You, John.”  

John stopped, head dropping to the side in a bemused tilt. “What?”

“Yep, can only be you.”  

Sherlock stopped as well, watching the way John’s brow barely bowed in and the corners of his lips twitched up into a not-smile. The expression looked odd and out of place but Sherlock couldn’t quite translate it before it had settled into something more neutral. He must not have caught the joking tone in Lestrade’s voice.

Lestrade eventually noticed he no longer had a moving audience and paused mid stride.

“Relax,” he said turning on his heel to face them, a hint of desperate laughter edging his tone. “I’m having one over on you.  'Though your DNA _was_ everywhere.  You must’ve forgotten to put gloves on before everything went to hell in a bloody handbasket.  We expected your DNA to show up in the forensic report, along with half the people on scene.”

John took a sip of coffee.  When he pulled the cup away his face had relaxed around a strained grin.  “What a disaster.”

“Tell me about it.”  

“Why are we here, you said you had something?” Sherlock said, taking one last look at the lines of John’s face before turning to Lestrade. “Something real.”

“Yeah.  We think the father did it.”  Lestrade held open the door to his office and let John and Sherlock file in before him.

“Don’t be stupid.”  

Lestrade shrugged.

“Well, I don't think that, but he’s the only suspect we’ve got and his DNA is all that's showed up that isn’t matched with one of ours.  Sergeant Donovan left earlier this morning to talk to him.  She should be calling in—”

“He’s the guy’s dad, of course his DNA would be on the car,” John interrupted.  “And what could he possibly have against Sherlock?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not,” Sherlock said.  “You never do.”

“Look here, princess,” Lestrade snapped, fragile good humor gone. “I’m sticking my neck out even having you here.  After what we found at the last crime scene Superintendent Caulfield wanted you gone.”

“I signed all the paperwork, she can’t call me off the case—”

Lestrade’s phone started ringing. Holding up his hand to shush Sherlock, he swiped his thumb across the screen and brought it to his ear. "What do you have for me?”

A pause.

Lestrade cursed.  “You have to be kidding me.  How long?”  Another pause.  “Okay, okay.  I’ll be there soon.  I have Sherlock—”  Another pause.  “—yes, I’m bringing him.”

He hung up.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”  Sherlock said.

“Suicide.”

“Like you believe that.”

“This breaks the pattern.”

“So did Jeremy and Millie. He’s changing the game.”

“Murder isn’t a game, Sherlock,” John said.

“Sure, whatever.”  Sherlock waved his hand, the tense lines of his back belying his flippant attitude.  

“ _Sherlock_.”  John’s voice pitched low in a quiet warning.  Sherlock ignored him.

“Let’s just go.”  Lestrade said before they could start arguing.

 

\--

 

David Newport lived in Brent, holed up in a rickety flat that smelled of stale cigarettes and old beer and the kind of mold that kills you slowly.  

Lestrade had an arm over his nose as they donned booties and suits.  Sherlock scoffed at the blue coveralls Donovan had ready for him but he put them on with minimal complaint.  

“Are we sure it’s suicide?”  Lestrade asked through the fabric of his coverall.

“Pretty sure.”  Donovan said.  She held out a few surgical masks, which Lestrade took gratefully.  John took one too when offered, but Sherlock refused.

“He’s in the bathroom.”  

David hung from the curtain rod in the shower, his body too light to even bend the plastic.  He looked like old cellophane, crumpled up and stretched out with his toes barely reaching the floor.

“He’s tiny.”  John wrinkled his nose behind his mask.  Sherlock glanced at him and saw none of his usual pity, just disgust in the pull of his brow.

“There’s no way this was quick.” Lestrade said.

“His body weight was barely enough to close the noose,” Donovan confirmed.  

Sherlock approached the body.  David’s skin was yellow, darker around the mouth and fingertips, but most notably in the eyes despite broken blood vessels making the sclera almost unrecognizable.  He smoked and possibly suffered liver damage from drink.  He was thin and papery, malnourished.  

“He was going to be evicted in three days.”  Donovan said.  “His phone’s full of texts from Jeremy asking for money or calling him names.  Nothing from Millie there, but he did have a collection of letters in his room from her.  He has no living relatives, his flat’s a disaster and there’s nothing but booze and expired milk in the fridge.”

The mask against John’s face twitched around a disdainful sniff. Sherlock frowned at him but John just shrugged and shook his head.

“No indication of forced entry?” Lestrade asked, oblivious to the silent exchange going on over his shoulders.

“No, you saw the entryway when we came in,” Sherlock said before Donovan could answer. “The lock’s intact.  He let his killer in.”

She scowled. “‘S’not a killer, freak.”

“Oh, do stop calling him that,” John said glaring at Donovan. She rolled her eyes and he sighed, looking at Sherlock apologetically.  “Though I think she’s right.  I’ve seen this before, it’s textbook.”

“No signs of struggle?  Anywhere?”

“No.”

“Shouldn’t we cut him down?”  John said.  “Seems disrespectful to continue on while he’s just hanging there.”

“This can’t be suicide.” Sherlock pulled at his hair, ignoring John and his contradictory nature.  

“I think it is, Sherlock.”  

Sherlock didn’t believe him, but after searching the flat he found nothing to prove that.

 

\--

 

Sherlock started pacing almost as soon as he stepped into their living area.  "It can't be a suicide. It doesn't make sense."

"You saw his home, the electricity was out and he was about to be too. His son was a hateful sod and what contact he had with his daughter ended when she was murdered.  He had nothing."

“It’s not suicide,” Sherlock wanted to tear his hair out but his head throbbed, tender from all the pulling he did at David’s flat.  For a second he thought of the gin he had tucked away in the freezer and then burried the temptation away. He found himself turning to alcohol more often than he’d like to think on.  “And he’s certainly not the killer.”

“No, probably not.  He’d have no reason to kill Millie.  Jeremy, sure, but not Millie,” John mused, cursing when Sherlock nearly took him out in his mad pacing. Sherlock didn’t care and would have continued his path back over the table and onto the couch if John hadn’t grabbed him by the shirt and tugged him to a stop.  

“Sherlock, maybe this is just a coincidence, you know?"

Sherlock shook free and continued with long strides onto the coffee table, knocking the last of the detritus there to the floor. "It's not—I know him, it's not."

Turning on his heel he hopped back to the floor with enough force to jar his bones.

"I don't think you do. If you did, wouldn't this case have been solved ages ago?"

Sherlock stared, feet almost skidding across the floor as he came to a stop.  "What?"

"Don't look at me like that!" John said from where he now leaned against the mantel, arms crossed tight over his chest.  "I'm just saying you're probably missing something."

"You're probably right."

"Really?"

" _No_!" Sherlock roared, giving in to the urge to tug at his hair. "You are being spectacularly unhelpful—even more so than usual and I assure you that _that_ is quite an accomplishment!"

"Oi! If you don't want me here, I'll go! I'm just trying to help."

“Well stop helping!” Sherlock shut his eyes and took a breath. When he opened his them again John had untangled his arms and his hands clenched in white-knuckled fists at his side. Sherlock signed through his teeth. "No, I don't want you to go. Just...shut up."

“Of course, your highness.” Instead of calming, John’s eyes blackened with his temper. “Anything else you desire?”  

John’s sarcasm stung and Sherlock’s anger flared as a voice in the back of his head balked at the sentiment. He warred against continuing into an argument, the promise of physical violence in John’s posture tantalizing but it would get him nowhere. So, he ignored John in favor of stalking off through the kitchen and into his room to think.  He grabbed the gin from the freezer on his way.

 

\--

 

When Sherlock finally emerged from his bedroom, his skin buzzed with alcohol and his mind with doubt.

“John, I think you’re right,” Sherlock said without checking to see if John was even there.

“Really? How unusual.” John’s voice came from the living room, thick with irritation.

“It does happen occasionally.”

“You’re an arse.”  John sat with his laptop balanced across his knees.  Answering email or comments on his blog, most likely.  The whiskey Sherlock usually kept in the cupboards stood like a pillar of gold next to a cut-glass tumbler on the coffee table.

“So I’ve been told.”  Sherlock sat down next to him on the couch and looked at the screen. It swirled with soothing color, asleep.

“I’m only trying to help,” John said finally after they sat staring at the same moving image for long, silent moments.  “I need to help.  It’s the only thing keeping my mind off of—”  He stopped, voice catching over words he wouldn’t say. “—and when you go stomping off like a teenager in a strop it makes it difficult to keep myself together.”

Sherlock looked away with a scowl.  He let his eyes scan the clutter of their living room as he tried to think of something to say. He settled on something that had been bothering him from earlier.

“You were angry at David Newport’s home.  Disgusted, more like.”

“Is that a question?”

“No, an observation.”

John snorted.  “Well spotted, then.”

Silence as Sherlock waited for him to elaborate. John pointedly did not.

“Why?”

“He reminded me of my dad, the lousy fuck.”  John poured a couple fingers worth of whiskey into his glass and drank deeply.  “I dunno why, dad didn’t do us the favor of offing himself.”

Sherlock bit back an automatic _not a suicide_ ; instead he tried to focus on the cold hatred that had slipped into John’s voice, but the gin had settled into his teeth, leaving them numb.  He bit at his bottom lip and John’s eyes slid down to where the pink flesh pinched down into white beneath dull incisors.

“Your dad was abusive.”

“God, you have no tact,” John said, not looking away from Sherlock’s mouth.

“Newport might have been, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the flat. The texts certainly, but you hadn’t seen them yet.”

“I could tell.”  John downed the rest of his whiskey.  He poured more and handed the glass to Sherlock. Sherlock took it, licking his lips to chase the last hints of juniper before replacing it with barrel wood and a whisper of vanilla and malt.  

John was staring again, eyes tracing the bob of Sherlock’s throat as he swallowed.

“You could tell?”  

John looked up, pupil starting to crowd out the dark blue of his iris.

John slid the glass from Sherlock’s hand and placed it on the table. “Sherlock?”

“Yes, John?”

“Shut up.”  John grabbed the fabric of Sherlock’s shirt and pulled him down until their lips crashed together, hard enough that Sherlock felt his split against John’s teeth.  Copper flooded his mouth and John moaned.

_badideabadideabadideabadidea_

Sherlock didn’t want to push John away, had craved John’s lips like fine heroin since their last tryst, but surely this was nothing but grief and frustration and anger and it certainly came from nowhere and—

John pulled back before Sherlock could make the decision to.  His eyes shown wild, mouth smeared with Sherlock’s blood.  “Stop thinking. Now.”

“But _John_.” A mistake, this would be a mistake but—

“No Sherlock. I mean it. Stop thinking, stop talking.”

“I don’t want to be another mistake.”

“You could never be a mistake," John said and even though Sherlock knew, he _knew_ those words to be a lie, he let them be permission to stop protesting.

John tugged him back over him, the taste of copper cloying as he forced his tongue between Sherlock's lips, brutal and domineering. Sherlock shifted to straddle John's thighs. His cock twitched slowly to response, hampered by alcohol. John's pressed hard and full beneath him, a straining bar of hot iron clad in denim.

Sherlock rolled his hips and tried not to think of a different time.

 

\--

 

_"This was a mistake." John said. They were sat in a cab, hailed after Lestrade bailed them out of the drunk tank. Sherlock could taste beer and whiskey and tequila heavy on his tongue, vomit an acrid overtone to the mix. His head throbbed_

_"You're marrying Mary." Sherlock said, a string of words to justify another. No real feeling behind them._

_"Yes."_

_"I don't fit into that."_

_John didn't respond._

 

\--

 

Sherlock desperate wanted to crowd into John below him, meld their bodies together until they existed as one entity flawed and cracked and raw. He wanted to feel sorry that he let himself give in, not even weeks after Mary’s death, but the feel of John—of stubble burn against his mouth and handfuls of thick jumper—made it hard to feel the guilt.

There was enough guilt lining the edges of Sherlock's mind without it anyway.

John yanked at the edges of Sherlock’s shirt, nearly popping the buttons free before Sherlock could undo them himself. As soon as he slipped the last button from its loop, John tugged the material from Sherlock’s shoulders to his elbows, trapping his arms.

“Better,” John hissed, descending on pale, scarred skin.  John had never asked Sherlock about the scars, and maybe it was better that way because Sherlock didn’t like to think about them; but now John traced the silver ribbons and mouthed at the puckered flesh and Sherlock either had to completely let go of his thoughts or sink down into a darkness he had more and more trouble rising free of.

John bit down hard on the line of a scar tracing from the bottom of Sherlock’s ribs to his underarm, setting off electricity strong enough that Sherlock nearly screamed. He did arch, sliding John’s mouth down the length of his torso and when their clothed cocks pressed flush together, Sherlock couldn’t help but keen.

Every thought but _more_ ran from the sensation.

“Hold still, gorgeous.” Sherlock rolled his head forward and saw John’s hands working at the fly of his trousers.  Sherlock squirmed, meaning to help but his arms were still trapped and John already had it handled, pushing on Sherlock’s thighs to get Sherlock to lift up.  Sherlock did, almost falling back into the coffee table when John reached for Sherlock’s own fly.

“Seriously, hold still or you’re going to fall and knock yourself out.” John grabbed Sherlock’s belt loops to balance him.  “Let me do the work.”

Alcohol made the removal of clothing a complicated task and Sherlock did end up falling back, hitting his shoulder blades against the table hard enough it slid on the carpet. The bottle of whiskey toppled over, rolling until it rested against Sherlock’s neck and he felt a trickle of liquid travel into the dip of his collarbone, not remembering John hadn’t capped it until the smell overwhelmed him.

“Oh, that’s a waste.” John stepped out of his trousers and pants, tossing them to the side before he straddled Sherlock, reversing their previous position.  “Let me.”

Sherlock’s shoulders throbbed in time with the pulse in his cock as John laved his tongue from collar to ear.  Sherlock moved his hips up, seeking contact but only getting the barest brush of flesh against flesh before John moved his own hips away.  Sherlock whined and squirmed and the table scooted further back until Sherlock lay flat against the ground in a pool of whiskey and John loomed over him, eyes dark and expression blank.

“John?”

John gave a little nod as if coming to a decision.  He turned just enough to grab two pillows from the couch and then stood up.  

“John!”

“I’m not going anywhere,“ he said, throwing a pillow at Sherlock. “Move back and put that beneath your head.  Then lift up your hips.”

Sherlock froze.  “John, I don’t have—”

“It’ll be fine.” Sherlock did as he was told, inching back until his face was mostly beneath the table and his vision of John effectively blocked. Sherlock lifted his hips and John slipped the other pillow beneath him

“There’s a good lad.” Strong, small hands wrapped around the underside up Sherlock’s knees, bending them up and out until they bumped against the wood of the table. Not long after he felt hot breath against his arsehole and just a bit of sense came back to him.

“John I haven’t showered yet you can’t, _oh fuck_ —” Sherlock jerked up when John’s tongue pressed against him, his head hitting the table and driving him back to the pillow beneath him with a pained moan. John petted the muscle of Sherlock’s thighs soothingly but didn’t surface from between Sherlock’s legs to check on him.  Sherlock would have cursed him if he had.

John traced the budded muscle, licking a stripe over it and Sherlock’s perineum before moving back and forcing his tongue just past the ring.  The sound of John eating him out coupled with Sherlock’s abortive cries crowded into the small living area.  Sherlock hoped Mrs. Hudson was not home, but stopped caring as soon John slid a finger in beside his thrusting tongue.

“John, god, John,” Sherlock chanted, not sure if he was asking him to stop or not.  

John pulled his mouth away and replaced his tongue with a second finger, scissoring them wide enough it burned past pleasant.  Sherlock was too drunk off of whiskey fumes and gin to protest.  He had just adjusted when John removed his fingers, leaving him empty and desperate.

“ _John_.”

“Hush, now.” Sherlock felt the blunt, saliva-slick head of John’s cock slide across his entrance and Sherlock groaned, now beyond wondering how they got to this point and desperate to speed it along. John pushed in slowly, taking care not to actually hurt Sherlock, but impatience had gotten the best of him and Sherlock thrust down getting about halfway before the burn was too much.

“Christ, Sherlock!” John gasped, and Sherlock could feel him rest his sweaty forehead against Sherlock’s left inner thigh. “Too fast, that was too fast.”

“No, move, slowly, but move,” Sherlock bit out as he adjusted.  “Need you to move.”

“I think—”

“John, _move_.”  John did, sliding forward until he was flush against Sherlock’s arse.  He stopped then, long enough to shove the table clear across the floor.  The tumbler that had survived Sherlock’s fall flew to the ground with a crash and Sherlock had enough time to think that broken glass had become a common feature of 221B before John pulled away and rammed back into Sherlock.

“Fuck, _fuck_.” Sherlock groped around for something to grab onto, settling for John’s biceps where they now framed his face.  Sherlock wanted to look up at John, wanted to see the way his face changed during sex but each thrust kept him breathless and gasping and lost in so much sensation that he simply couldn’t open his eyes.

With each thrust the carpet scraped and abraded the skin of Sherlock’s back and he could feel his nails digging hard enough into John’s arms to part the skin and the violence of it all was enough to drive him to the edge.

Sherlock’s paroxysm hit him hard and unexpectedly, curling his toes and numbing his tongue even as John kept his pace. It hurt as Sherlock’s body wound down, over sensitive so soon after climax but just as it became too much, as Sherlock almost had to push John away, John shuddered and pulled out. John cursed as his cum splattered across Sherlock’s inner thighs and joined Sherlock’s own spend on his stomach and chest.  John collapsed half on top of Sherlock and they lay there, gasping for breath; sweat and spunk started to dry in the cold air of the flat.

Sherlock moved first, the throbbing of his shoulders and head and arse too uncomfortable to ignore.  “John, I need to get up.”

“Mmm, yeah.” John shifted but it was a long moment before he actually moved.  

“That was—” John searched for words, but the buzz of alcohol and post sex chemicals seemed to keep him from finishing his thought.  His expression sat weird on his face, like it was meant to be affectionate but didn't quite hit the mark. “I need a shower.”

“Me too, you go first.”  John nodded and stood up, padding off to their shared bathroom while Sherlock remained sprawled on the floor.

He sat there a long time, listening to the creak of old pipes and rush of water.  By the time John had left the shower and Sherlock had replaced him beneath a lukewarm spray, he still couldn’t place the feeling of oil and emptiness settled at the pit of his stomach.

  
He went to bed confused and alone and woke much the same.


	6. Act II Scene iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for how delayed I am with this chapter. But as you know, life happens and life just so decided to happen to me. 
> 
> On a side note, it was fantastic to see some of you at 221b Con and maybe I'll meet a few more of you at Gridlock! 
> 
> Definitely remember to check the tags. I mentioned it in the first chapter notes, but I think I should warn you again that there is NO happy ending to this story and we've reached the spiral down. So buckle up and enjoy the ride!

_The world filtered to him, clear and bright like concentrated sunlight.  His heart raced.  He still couldn’t solve the puzzle.  He just saw his failure in sharp relief, a black shadow painted for everyone to see._

_Maybe a bit more would help._

_He inhaled, his nose stung. Everything remained stubbornly opaque._

\--

When Sherlock woke up he knew he had to escape the flat.

His brother called Sherlock’s descent into black moods Danger Days.  Emphasis on the alliteration, capital letters to make the title important. Melodramatic, a Holmes’ flaw.

Today was a Danger Day.

\--

 

Sherlock didn’t like the way his heart ached as he walked down the empty paths of Regent’s Park.  It was a dull sort of ache, the kind that sucked the space from behind the breastbone; simultaneously too big and too small. A vacuum.  

He could still smell whiskey on him, clinging to his hair, to his skin—like he had soaked it up, fine paper stained with new ink. He’d showered. Then showered again. Scrubbed until his fingers bled and his skin shone red and angry.  

His palms itched.

His back itched too, worn raw from the carpet, the thrust of John’s strong hips, the grip of the fingers beneath his knees. He limped around the twinge in his arse, wished to cherish and forget pain of it all.

Sherlock walked faster; beating his feet into the ground, stomping to dislodge the sentiment stuck between his ribs, hoping to leave it scattered across the path.  Instead he strained the arches, bruised the heels and made everything worse.

He sat gingerly onto a bench and let his fingers travel to his pockets, pads ghosting over the crisp texture of fresh bills. It was a lot. It was enough.

Sherlock shouldn’t be thinking of John, now. He should be thinking of gored torsos and snapped necks, hammers and feathers.  John was becoming a distraction—the alcohol soaked sex, fizzy with beer, painful with...he didn’t know what with. Was John sincere, did John actually want him?

Fuck, he couldn’t concentrate.

His phone buzzed. Once, twice and then nothing. A text. Sherlock ignored it and tried to work on the pieces he’d kept tangled in his head.  

Sister then brother then father.  That couldn’t be a coincidence.  But all three broke the pattern. A sister who had done nothing wrong, had been haunted by the greedy touch of an abusive, angry brother.  The brother had been beaten in what? true anger, forced anger, faked anger? It was a mess, but ultimately he had been left alive long enough to gasp and thrash and cause such a scene. _I BELIEVED IN SHERLOCK HOLMES_.  The edges of the words ragged and bloodied, ripped open anew.  And then the father, hanging by the shower rod, for all the world a truly suicidal man...but he _couldn’t_ be.

His phone buzzed again—two minute reminder he had a text.  He ignored it.

His palms itched.

His head hurt.

His back stung.

His heart ached.

Steepling his fingers beneath his nose he tried to drown out the not-sounds of an empty park, the clamoring of his useless emotions and searched for details he might have missed.  Dipping into his mind palace, Sherlock traveled to the car, searched it from every angle, boots squelching in congealing blood, nose filling with the tang of it.  Feathers scattered everywhere, Jeremy terrified of the voices and hands pressed against him, tongue breaching gore and torn lips, broken teeth dribbling from his chin, falling to his lap.

Maybe he’d been drugged? Maybe his reawakening had been intentional?  No one else had survived.

The change of MO seemed a clue, a jab at those trying to catch their killer, their Guardian Angel.  Maybe he was mocking them.

And then the message.   _I BELIEVED IN SHERLOCK HOLMES_.  That fed the impression of desperate anger.  Betrayal sat heavy in the sleek lines of the cuts.

And then there was John.  John trying to push the man back against the seat, John trying to calm him, John’s voice ringing with authority.

John pressing Sherlock’s knees to his chest, John rutting into Sherlock until he chafed, John’s face hidden by the coffee table as the sting of whiskey rose in Sherlock’s nose.  Sting turning to tang turning back to the squelch of blood and Sherlock felt pleasure pool and felt blood coat every surface of him and then and then and then—

He surfaced with a gasp, fingers gripping at each other until the skin began to peel away.

His mind palace was useless.

Sherlock jolted up, hands digging into his pockets to crumple the cash there, palms itching like they had been coated with poison oak oils; skin warmed until the pores opened and took in every last drop, introducing the contaminant to his blood, his limbs and his mind. Everything itched.

His phone rang.  Generic, tinkling chime snapping him back to reality in just enough time to pull the device free and slide his thumb across the screen to answer. Molly.

“What?”

“I’ve been trying to reach you.” Her voice was hushed but excited.  “You don’t normally ignore texts.”

“I only got the one.”  

“Must be bad reception, I’ve sent at least five.”  He pulled the phone away, switching to the chat app and sure enough there were several messages waiting to be viewed.  He saw feathers in one image and immediately his blood ran cold before superheating with triumph.

“You have good news?”

“I wouldn’t call it that but Greg, I mean Inspector Lestrade,” she coughed, tittered and then continued on. “Asked me to snoop around that last body.  Technically there wasn’t an autopsy requested, pretty clear suicide by the looks of it.  So I couldn’t cut in to him like I wanted to, but I did poke around.  Guess what I found?”

She waited but Sherlock kept silent.  She huffed. “You always expect everyone else to play around with your dramatics but when I try it...oh, never mind.  I found feathers.  White ones.  Shoved into his throat.  They were way down in there, carefully placed but I could see some of the plume sticking to the tissue.  There were three in all, I’m filing a request to do a proper autopsy but I wanted to see if you wanted a look before I did.”

“You are an angel, Molly.”  

“I do what I can.”  And then she hung up, leaving Sherlock just a bit less agitated and no longer clutching the bills in his pocket like his only lifeline.

He hurried back to the main streets of London and hailed a cab.

\--

“There’s still no evidence of a struggle.”  Molly said as Sherlock fluttered around the corpse, sliding magnifying glass already out and proving useless.

“No.”  He knew that already but he had—romantically, foolishly—hoped he’d make some grand observation coming through the door.

“But the feathers have to mean something.”  She frowned, hugging her clipboard close to her chest.  “And they’ll certainly be enough to warrant an autopsy.”

“The feathers have been kept out of most of the reports,” Sherlock said, frustration starting to clog in his throat.  “There has to be something more.”

“They’re enough for now.”  She said again.  “How many suicides do you see with feathers in their throats?”

“Call me when you know something.”

“Of course.”

Sherlock slid the travel magnifying glass into his back pocket as his phone buzzed.  Pulling that out he saw John’s name and an inquiry to his location glowed on the lock screen.  He stared at it for long moments and felt his stomach tighten with anxiety.  The backlight went out. He clicked it back on and typed a quick response, heading for the door.

_Leaving morgue. Meet me at NSY -SH_

“Hey Sherlock?”  He had his hand on the steel door but something in Molly's voice made him stop.

“What?”

“Remember to take care of yourself.”  He turned to face her, confused.  She flushed and looked away.  “I mean, you look—I don’t know, worn?  Not your normal self when you’re on a case, you know?”

He frowned.  “I’m fine.”

She sighed.  “Yeah, sure, of course you are.  But if you need anything, anything at all, you have my number.”

Sherlock watched her shuffle around for a moment, silent longer than was probably polite but he didn’t know how to respond.

“Right, stupid.” She muttered and turned her back, pretending to look for something in an empty drawer.  

“Thank you.”  Sherlock finally said, leaving before she could respond.

\--

“There were feathers in his throat!”  Sherlock entered Lestrade’s office off-kilter and it seemed that he would remain that way.  John already sat at Lestrade’s desk, fingers tearing apart the cardboard sleeve around his coffee. He wouldn’t look at Sherlock.

“Doesn’t prove anything.”

“You’re not that dense!”

“You're right, but I’m also not declaring this a murder without proper evidence!  You saw his corpse, there were no signs of a struggle.”

“I don’t care!  There were feathers in. his. throat.”  Maybe repeating that statement would make it more concrete for Lestrade.

“I got that the first time, thanks,” Lestrade grumbled, foul temper drawing up the lines of his shoulders.  A warning not to push—a warning ignored.

“Maybe he was coerced!”

“It wouldn’t be hard to convince a man like that to commit suicide,” John said, finally piping into the conversation.  “You saw the state of his flat.  And both his kids are dead, so what did he really have left?”

“See?”  Sherlock snapped.  “Even John gets it!”

“Hey!”

“You know I didn’t mean offense.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not offensive.”  

“Boys, seriously, keep your spats out of my office.”  Lestrade rubbed at his temples and Sherlock took a moment to take in how tired he looked, how thin beneath his heavy suit jacket.  This case ate at them all. “Even if he were coerced, that’s mighty hard to prove.  Remember the cabbie?  Only reason we got anything on him is because John saved your sorry ass and left us a body and a witness.”

John stiffened, eyes wide.  “You knew?”

“Of course I knew!  I’m not an idiot—” Sherlock snorted and Lestrade scowled. “—but that’s beside the point.  The presence of feathers is enough for a full work up, but I doubt it will prove anything.”

There was a moment of silence in which Sherlock watched John tear the cardboard sleeve between his fingers into shreds, making a mess of his lap.  He kept watching, mesmerized by John’s slow movements, his obvious anxiety turned destructive, body language turned inward.  Sherlock tried to think of David Newport’s body, hung limp and turning blue at the tips of his extremities but, instead, he thought of John’s thin lips pressed in a line and his stiff shoulders.

David Newport had had thin lips too, purpling along the edges from lack of oxygen and...oh.

“Morphine.”  

John finally looked at Sherlock, squinting his eyes in brief question. “What?”

“It’s morphine.  He must have overdosed—it would present enough like strangulation to not come under suspect.  How did I miss that?”  Sherlock tugged at his hair.  This was getting out of control, he kept missing too much.  He stalked from the room without another word.

\--

John went out drinking that night and Sherlock pestered Molly for answers, trying not to feel abandoned.

By early morning he had a response—an unofficial one, pretest rushed at his insistent behest—but it confirmed his suspicions.

David Newport had traces of morphine around his lips.

\--

“I told you it wasn’t a suicide,” Sherlock said when John came down from his room.  He must have wandered in during the couple of hours Sherlock dozed.  

Sherlock wanted to feel triumphant that he had been right while everyone else had shuffled around with their heads deep in the dirt, but he wasn’t any closer to catching the killer.

“What?”  John yawned, rubbed at his face to erase the lingering sleep there.  

“Molly said there were traces of morphine around David Newport’s mouth.  He must have ingested it somehow.  Maybe the killer had slipped it into a drink or something?”

“And how does that help?”  John was oddly tense for just waking, shoulders slowly crawling up to his ears as he stomped into the kitchen where Sherlock currently loitered.  Sherlock wanted to reach out and rub the tension away but he didn’t know if he was allowed to, if the other night had been a drunken romp or something more.  He didn’t want to break the silence.

“It proves several men’s innocence for one,” Sherlock said.  John snorted.

“What?”

“Like you care about that.”  John’s voice sounded muffled and distorted as he stuck his head into the fridge.  He reemerged with the milk, raising it at Sherlock in question.  Sherlock moved past him and filled the kettle, setting it to boil on the hob.  It gave him a moment to hide his face, certain as he was that it reflected the sting John’s words had carried.

“It proves he’s changing his pattern. Drastically.”  Sherlock tried again.

“That sounds more like you.”  

Sherlock stiffened, took a breath and schooled his features into something neutral. He should be elated by the new development in the case. He wasn’t. Instead he wanted to grip John by the shoulders and shake him. _I can care! I have done so much to prove I care!_ he wanted to yell but instead he watched the bubbles form at the bottom of the kettle as it heated.

“I’ve upset you.”  It was not a question.  John probably saw the way his shoulders bunched beneath his shirt, or some other tell that Sherlock had not managed to catch and smooth away. Sherlock sighed. The kettle started to shriek.

“Don’t be absurd.”  Sherlock dragged the screaming kettle from the hob and poured boiling water into the two mugs from the other morning.  The bit of residue from the old tea swirled into the heated water, dancing to mix with new tea steeping from the sachets Sherlock dropped in belatedly.  

“Come here.”  John placed the milk on the counter by the mugs and put a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, tugging him around.

“I don’t need to be coddled.”  Sherlock didn’t look up, didn’t want to see pity or whatever might be lurking in John’s eyes.  John stood so close though, his body heat like a gravitational field and Sherlock the foolish satellite trying to pull away.

“No, but you’ve been tense for awhile.  And I’d bet a sizeable amount it’s because of the other night.”

“I’m not so sentimental.”  Sherlock could have cursed himself—things like that? They were why no one believed him capable of caring.

“Bullshit.”  

Sherlock sighed again and finally leaned forward instead of away.  Once within proper range, John grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down, gently touching his lips to Sherlock’s in a tender kiss.

Sherlock felt something prickle at the corners of his eyes.  His breath hitched and the tension he’d held in his core bled into the kiss, turning it rough.  Sherlock snaked his fingers into the soft-stiff hairs at the nape of John’s neck and tugged him closer, desperate for nearness, desperate to know he wasn’t actually alone.

John pulled away.  “The tea’s going to oversteep.”

“We have more.”  Sherlock maneuvered them so that John was trapped between him and the refrigerator. He dropped to his knees and nuzzled into John’s hip.

“We do, don’t we?”

Sherlock hummed and breathed hot air over the growing bulge at his mouth.  John was still in his pyjamas, loose flannels that did nothing to hide John’s arousal.  Sherlock nuzzled into the material, inhaling deeply the stale musk of sleep and male genitalia gathered there.

John groaned, tea forgotten and Sherlock knew he’d won his communion for now.  Give the man a round of applause, he’d stolen something John might not have been offering.  It was a dirty tactic, but Sherlock needed the intimacy and if turning something gentle and tentative into something that bruised and stung would get him that, he wasn’t above it.

A tentative moment of silence and then Sherlock was clawing at the material, pulling it from John’s hips and sliding his mouth over the swollen head.  He sucked down, the glans pushing against his nasal passages and blocking the flow of air.

John yanked him closer and Sherlock lost himself in the pain of complete invasion.

John never opened his eyes.

\--

When Sherlock cleaned the mugs with their forgotten tea, the sachets burst and released thick and water-logged leaves across the sink.  He watched them drain and wondered if it would be just as easy to wash the grit sticking to him like sand.  

It wouldn’t, but he could hope.

\--

Sherlock had never lost concentration so easily.  John distracted him, that much was obvious. Something had changed and John was no long the conductor of light he had been for so many years. Yet, Sherlock couldn’t live without whatever it was that John now offered him.  

Sherlock couldn’t live without solving this case.

Sherlock felt his grip on promises past starting to slip as failure reared its head up proud, loud and oh so smug as it showed Sherlock every single way he was not performing up to par.

The rooms he kept locked in the back of his mind—the ones that hid the darkness away—began to shake and rattle on their hinges.  They would soon break down one by one.

Failure always had had the weakest locks.

\--

John spent most of the day reading and Sherlock spent most of it rearranging his wall of clues.  No matter what configuration he placed the photos and articles in, no new information revealed itself.

His jaw hurt. Just another pain to file away with his back and his head and somewhere near the core of him.

He didn’t get anywhere, just made a mess, papers slowly starting to cover the floor and creep into his bed.  His eyes now ached, he had papercuts everywhere.  The TV murmured in the living room.

Now he sat in a sea of papers, the world blotted out by glossy photos of dismembered woman, beaten men.  His vision blurred.  He fell asleep.

\--

Sherlock dreamt of feathers.

They coated the ground at his feet, glaring white where blood hadn’t soaked into the plumes. Some felt waxy against the skin of his toes, others sucked and gripped at his heels.

It all smelled of whiskey.

His head buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, a constant irritant that settled in the marrow of his bones, rattling around his skull.  He tried to concentrate; somewhere in the mess of white and red and pink he knew he’d find the answers he sought, but the buzzing was too much and he was losing his grip.

Sherlock woke with a start, his phone vibrating incessantly on the bedside table.  It fell to the ground with a thump.

He groaned, rubbing at his eyes violently to clear the nightmare, the lingering feeling that he knew how to solve the case. It was a fool’s hope. He was as lost as he had been from the beginning.

Rolling to his side, he reached for his phone. Papers crumpled beneath him and for a second he wished he could just go back to sleep and forget everything.

 _Missed call and voicemail from Janine Hawkins._ Dread settled into his stomach.

Janine.  How had Sherlock forgotten about Janine?

“Sherlock Holmes, as soon as I get back to London I will kill you, I swear on Mary’s grave.”

She sounded choked, words thick with anger and grief and Sherlock felt guilt. He didn’t like this new emotion that insisted on sitting in his heart like an old friend.  

Everything itched and Sherlock was nowhere close to solving this case and John only touched him with violence in his veins.

Sherlock got up, dressed and went back to the park, back bent to the cold and weight of his failure.

\--

Sherlock wanted to think faster so he stayed away from Freddy.  Freddy liked things that dragged you down, made your limbs heavy with pleasure and slowed your thoughts to cool syrup.  Sherlock needed knife edge and bright, heartbeat moving along to keep up as he cut his observation time down in half.

So he went to Sheila.

“Holmes?” Sheila cut a rough figure, face cragged and lined with weather.  She stood almost as tall as him and could strike a punch harder than a mule’s kick. He liked her.

“Sheila.” Sherlock dug into his pocket for the bills, once crisp now soft as cloth from his constant gripping and twitching.  

“I thought you gave it up.” She said and Sherlock didn’t want to evaluate the sadness and disappointment buried in black eyes.  He needed a boost, needed to fly and dance along the lines of evidence now completely obscure to him.

“Don’t patronize me,” Sherlock snarled and then regretted it as her face closed off to him.

“Whatever, I’m not your babysitter.”  She glared and Sherlock matched it, not sure how to proceed.  His coat wasn’t protecting well against the cold, the bushes not providing much cover.  It had been so long since his last trip to see her and even longer since he managed to anger her so.  She held out a hand.

“Come on now, pay up and piss off.”  

He did, stepping away quickly with his purchase.

His phone buzzed.  Another body.

\--

Sherlock brought photos of the body back to the flat with him and pinned them to his growing, bloody mosaic of clues.

His fingers itched toward the little bag of powder in his pocket.  

Everything seemed so muddy.

Maybe just a little bump would help.

Maybe just a smidge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://catie-brie.tumblr.com/) where I love to answer questions, comments, chats or just have you as a friendly stalker. It's also where I periodically post about fanfic I am working on.


	7. Act II Scene iv

The last body mocked with a heavy hand.

“He looks like you,” Donovan said, solemn and eyes averted just shy of Sherlock’s shoulder.  He stiffened, not sure how to react to the lack of antagonism in the tilt of her voice.

“There are some similarities.”

“No, he looks _just_ like you.”  

Sherlock didn’t want to think about that.  He didn’t want to think about the way that John had taken one glance at the body sprawled out across the sidewalk and immediately turned on his heel, walking the other way; or the stricken look Lestrade had done his best to hide.

“He’s too short.”  A minor detail.  Donovan was right, he did look like Sherlock.  Body broken, navy belstaff spread like wings, hair a mess of bloody curls.

“This is cruel.” Lestrade intentionally kept his eyes off the corpse, off of Sherlock.  No one seemed able to look at him.

“And the others haven’t been?”  Sherlock snapped, distress getting the best of him. He couldn’t look much longer, he was starting to feel sick—picking up on too much, too little.  The belstaff was newly bought, bruising along the arms indicated blunt force trauma, the blood patterns across the high cheekbones almost exactly the same as Sherlock’s had been.  The breaks in the bones would probably be similar, but this body hadn’t fallen off of Bart’s roof, it had been displayed. Beaten and arranged as close to Sherlock’s as possible.

“You know what I mean.”  

Sherlock stared into unseeing eyes a shade darker than his own and couldn’t tell if what he felt was anger or grief eating away at him.

“I’m going to check on John. I’ll come by to grab photos of the crime scene later.”

Feathers scattered as he walked away, the swirling remains of a fallen angel.  

—

When distressed, John walked.  So Sherlock hailed a cab and asked the driver to go slow.  Sure enough, John had made it halfway to their flat, short legs pumping fast, when Sherlock spotted him.

“John!”  Sherlock threw a couple of bills at the cabbie and couldn’t be arsed if they weren’t enough or too much as he jumped out of the still moving vehicle.  Traffic moved slow, but cars still blared at him as he rushed across the street, panicked but unable to place why.

If John heard him, he made no show of it as he stomped his way forward, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket.  The few pedestrians around gave him a wide berth, scared of whatever they saw in his face.  

“John, stop!”  Sherlock ran, long legs quickly covering the distance between them.  He gripped John’s shoulder and spun him around.  John had his face set to empty, blank and unfeeling.

Sherlock felt cold.

“John?”  

Pain blossomed across Sherlock’s abdomen, and it took several moments to realize that John had hit him, fist driving into his stomach.  John’s face stuttered dark now, the kind of dark that cracked open to release lightning and hail—the kind of dark that meant destruction.

“ _You left!_ ” John pulled his hand back, maybe to swing again, maybe not, but Sherlock caught him before he could.

“I came back.”  Sherlock didn’t know what to say beyond that.  He’d apologized before, would apologize a thousand times more if he thought it would actually make a difference.  He knew it wouldn’t.

“Too late, you came back too late.” John’s fist clenched in Sherlock’s own.

“I tried.”  Something broke in Sherlock’s chest.  The cracks leaked and oozed black and tar like.  He knew he’d never be able to wash the feeling away, not after seeing the look of utter betrayal in John’s eyes, the pure hurt and hatred.

John inhaled sharply, pulled himself together and let his trapped arm go limp.

“Yeah, I know.”

He pulled away and continued walking home and Sherlock knew he couldn’t follow.  The packaged powder in his pocket burned, a further reminder of his failure.

—

“How’s John?”  Lestrade asked when Sherlock strode in.

“Do you have the photos?”

“They’ll be up in a minute—I asked them to expedite printing.”  Lestrade had two coffees on his desk, one already half drunk, the other untouched.  “Now, how is John?”

“Oh, he’s great.”  His stomach throbbed, bruised and twinging.  He had deserved that.  

“Hmm.”  Lestrade lifted the second coffee and held it out to him.  Sherlock took it, the warmth against his palm an odd comfort.  “And you’re wincing because, what?  Ran into a doorknob, did you?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“Don’t bullshit me.”  He didn’t sound angry, just tired.  “I knew as soon as I saw the body John would lose it—”

“Then why the hell didn’t you warn me?” Sherlock bristled, hand tightening around the paper cup until hot coffee spilled over the lip of the lid, burning his hand.  Cursing, he put the cup down on Lestrade’s desk and wiped his hand on his trouser leg.

“Did you know—” Lestrade said, ignoring Sherlock as he changed tracks. “—that John wouldn’t talk to anyone after you ‘died’?”  

Sherlock collapsed into the chair across Lestrade, anger draining to a low thrum. “No.”

“You see, I’d invite him out—set up a time and place at least once a week.  I’d wait around but he’d never show.  I kept doing it though, needed him to know he had someone to come to when he finally wanted to talk.  I think he blamed me at that point. Me and Donovan and Anderson.  Rightly so, if I'm being honest with myself.”

He glanced to the side, eyes going vague as he lost himself in thought for a moment.

“Anyway, around that time, we kept finding these tags in bright yellow paint all over the city: _I believe in Sherlock Holmes_ , _Moriarty was real_ , _Richard Brook is a lie_. That sort of thing. Now, I don’t know much about graffiti but it was obvious that there were a lot of people painting them. Someone found a few canisters of paint on Anderson and he lost his job.”

Lestrade took a sip of his coffee and Sherlock fought the urge to scream at him to hurry up.  No one had told him much of what happened during his absence and he had been terrified to pursue it when he came back.  For once, knowing just didn’t seem worth the emotional turmoil it would stir up in those around him. In John.

“Well, there was one particular style that popped up more often than others.  It matched the first tag we ever found.  A friend remarked it looked like the artist was left handed but it wasn’t until she called me on her beat that I knew for sure that this was what John had started doing with his evenings.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“Sherlock, even you aren’t that dense.”  

 _He’s wanted to say that to me for days_ , Sherlock thought uncharitably. He glared at Lestrade and said nothing.

“Maybe you are.”  Lestrade smiled, not unkindly.  “Your death almost destroyed him, you know, but I think it was your return that really did him in.”

“And you’re telling me this because, what?  You want to make me feel guilty?”

“No, of course not. I want you to—”

Someone knocked on the door.  Before Lestrade could say anything more, it swung open and a small woman came in, holding a folder.  “The photographs you req—”

Sherlock snatched them from her and stood up.  “Those are for me.”

“Sherlock, wait!”  But Sherlock had already pushed past the girl.  

Sherlock needed to find somewhere secluded.  He needed to get high, needed to speed his thoughts and he needed to do it now. All Lestrade’s story had done was convince him that he needed to solve this case quickly and by any means possible.  

Sherlock brought the photos of the body back to the flat with him and pinned them to his growing, bloody mosaic of clues.

His fingers itched toward the little bag of powder in his pocket.  

Everything seemed so muddy.

Maybe just a little bump would help.

Maybe just a smidge. 

—

By the end of the evening Sherlock had completely torn apart his case wall and rearranged it no less than six times.  The prints from earlier lay glossy and taunting on his bed.  His eyes hurt, his mind yet to catch any vital clues and an itchy sort of irritation had settled into his blood, making it impossible to sit still.

_What he knew for certain:_

-Guardian Angel (GA) victims went back over two years

-The first six official murders were of known criminals free on technicalities

-Hence the nickname Guardian Angel

-Eighth kill, Millie Newport, was an anomaly: killed quickly, no history of criminal behavior

-Ninth kill, Jeremy Newport, only victim left alive. Whether intentional or not to be determined

-GA made disdain of Sherlock obvious here

-Tenth murder, David Newport, completely breaks pattern.  None of usual violence: up to this point all victims died of blow to head by ball-pein hammer. David given enough morphine to overdose then strung up to look like suicide. Negligent father but not criminal like 1-7 and 9.

-Eleventh kill, John Doe, obviously meant to mimic Sherlock’s death. That makes two kills done for Sherlock’s benefit now.  

-John Doe had been posed.  Further evidence that killer had knowledge of CCTV camera rotations. Had to have been done quickly, killer had to be strong.

-GA is killing at an increasing pace

 

_Unknown but likely:_

-GA could be a member of the Met or someone with connections in the Met

-Would explain knowledge of case details not released to public

-GA could be a medical professional

-Experienced with medical equipment

- ~~GA could be two people—one killing for sport, one with a vendetta against Sherlock????~~

 ~~-~~ Actually, not likely, all kills except David Newport had too many similarities to explain partners or even a copycat

 

 _Possibles_ :

-GA is pretending to have vendetta against Sherlock, a known figure in London, to throw Met off tracks

-GA _actually_ has vendetta that was set off by Sherlock’s return (see John’s theory of spurned client)

 

 _Conclusion_ :

-Increased pace of kills indicates GA is reaching endgame

~~-Fuck all else~~

 

Sherlock let out a frustrated growl, hands tearing at his hair.  He was getting nowhere.  

He needed information on the John Doe, a name, a history. _Anything_.

Sherlock pulled out his phone intending to call Lestrade and demand what he knew, despite the hour (how was it already three?), but a series of raps on his door stopped him.

“Sherlock?”  Sherlock felt his skin go cold-hot and tight with anxiety.  John's voice filtered through, sounding tentative and unsure of his welcome.

For a moment Sherlock thought spitefully of ignoring John—John had hit him and Sherlock could still feel the dull throb of it.  But it was _John_ and John was Sherlock’s best friend and John was hurting so of course he had lashed out, especially after being reminded so suddenly of Sherlock’s betrayal.  Sherlock had hurt John first.  

Sherlock sent a quick message off to Lestrade demanding details, scanned the room for any paraphernalia (John didn’t need Sherlock’s lapse on his mind, not now and hopefully not ever) and then opened the door.

“What is it John? You should be asleep.”  

“Not tired.”

“And?”

“And I wanted to make sure you were alright,” He said with a shrug, eyes not quite meeting Sherlock’s. When Sherlock didn’t answer John continued, blustering out a justification. “It’s just, Mrs. Hudson’s been up to check on you and you’ve not left your room for hours.”

“I’m fine.”  Sherlock said, wincing at how dismissive he sounded. John visibly drooped.

“Alright then.” John stepped back from the door.  “Good, I’ll just—” He turned on his heel and started to walk back into the kitchen, shoulders tense.  Sherlock’s stomach twisted with disappointment.

“John?”

John turned around.

“Maybe you can help me with this?”

John perked up a bit.  “Yeah, sure, whatever you need.”

Sherlock stood aside to let John in.  John’s hand trailed against Sherlock’s thigh as he passed.  Sherlock’s brain short-circuited, brought down to points of heat not leaving bruises.

Sherlock shut the door.  For a moment they stood in the middle of the room, awkward and tense.  Sherlock twitched and fought against the agitation crawling beneath his skin, fidgeting enough to ruin his attempt at appearing in control.  His skin felt hot where John had touched him and his concentration wavered.  

“I’ve rearranged and reevaluated all the evidence at my disposal multiple times.  I have a picture of him in my head, but it’s blurry and useless.”  Sherlock said, gesturing at the mess of photos and clippings cluttering his bed.  John nodded and picked up a photo of the John Doe. He stiffened and Sherlock panicked.  

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock said, desperation thick in his throat.

John sighed, a heavy gust of air that shook the photo in his hand.  “I know.”

“I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know.”

Sherlock felt the brief connection they had established slipping as John retreated.  Always, always retreating.  So he did the only thing he could, he grabbed John and kissed him.  John held still for one, two, three counts and then they were fumbling at clothes and shoving things aside on the bed. John reached behind him tugged the duvet back, scattering the contents of the case to the floor and the pillows. He twisted so that Sherlock fell to the mattress.

There was nothing gentle about the way Sherlock let his desperation and fear guide his fingers to grip like steel spines against John’s arms and neck and thighs until John manhandled him onto his hands and knees. Sherlock gripped the sheets with the same manic strength and not for the first time wondered how he had become this disaster of a man.  

And again, the case was neglected in favor of tugged hair and teeth marks and the roughness of sheets tangled around Sherlock’s face and their knees and their toes.

Satin clogged his nose and glossy photos slipped beneath his fingers and Sherlock once again missed John’s eyes as he came.

—

“You have to have something,” Sherlock snapped into the phone, voice pitched low despite the urge to scream.  Lestrade gave a world-weary sigh, ruined spectacularly by a yawn.  Sherlock couldn’t have gotten more than two hours of sleep; it sounded like Lestrade had slept even less.

“I gave you a name.”

“Yes, and?  A name is nothing.  I need his criminal history, the toxicology report, the exact cause of death—anything!”

“Fuck off, we’re doing the best we can.”

“You’re best isn’t good enough, I’m coming down there.”

“Delightful. Bring coffee.”  Lestrade hung up and Sherlock rolled out of bed.

Sherlock rushed to dress, tripping over the mess of photographs and newspaper snippets and wadded clothing strewn across the floor.  He glanced at the bed, at John’s sleeping form and wondered what it would be like if he moved in. A warm, permanent fixture.  

Sherlock laughed, shoved his knuckles between his teeth to stop.  Hysterics beat against the soft flesh of his throat and he felt around the pockets of yesterday’s trousers for whatever cocaine might be left.  Better to have it on him than anywhere where John might find it.  

Maybe a bit would help him sort out the mess of clues Marvin Mayweather refused to produce.

—

“Marvin Mayweather is an utterly boring individual.  Criminal record consists of a few parking violations and one count of disturbing the peace.  He moved to the states three years ago to pursue a career in modeling.  Quite the fanbase over there too, but not so much over here. Came back to London a month ago. He was visiting a relative or something.”

Lestrade gave Sherlock a tightlipped smile.  “You Googled him, I gather?”

“Yes, traffic was a mess and you had proved utterly useless in providing any real information. The name did help.”  Sherlock started pacing.  “It didn’t take long to find him online. He was very active on social media—tweeted his every move.  Facebook provided even more with all his check-ins and status updates. All activity ceased three days ago.”

“You didn’t bring coffee.”

Sherlock scoffed.  “You’ve got a mug on your desk, the trembling in your hands suggests you’ve already had several cups.  I did you a favor not bringing you more.”

“Thought that counts.”  Lestrade said and followed Sherlock’s pacing with a keen eye.

“Pointless. Do you having anything else?”

“Nothing I’m going to share with you at the moment.”

“Why?”

“Sherlock, how about you sit.”  Sherlock stopped pacing and turned his full attention to Lestrade, unease slipping in beneath the manic energy pulsing through him.  He touched his nose, checking for powder and Lestrade narrowed his eyes before relaxing back into his chair.  Sherlock wasn’t fooled.  

“I don’t want to sit.”

“No, I imagine you wouldn’t.”

“Tell me what you know so you can go back to being useless and I can start getting something done.”

“No.”

“Lestrade, this is pointless.”

“Sit.”

“Fine.”  Sherlock fell into the seat and leaned in, fingers tapping against the wooden desk.  Lestrade let his eyes scour Sherlock’s face before he gave a little nod.

“You’re off this case.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Sherlock your pupils are so wide I’d say your eye color was black if I didn’t know better.”

“So?”

“I can’t have you at crime scenes like this.” Lestrade crossed his arms over his chest, expression dropping into heavy lines of disappointment.  Sherlock twitched and scowled and did his best to sit still.

“You need me.”

“You’re high.”

“Of course I am!” Sherlock couldn’t sit anymore. Hopping up from his chair he paced the small space of Lestrade’s office.  “This case is maddening—I can’t for the life of me figure out the motivation.  He’s changed everything. The evidence isn’t adding up and I had to be missing something obvious but a little bit of cocaine and things seem so clear now, I’m so close Lestrade you cannot take me off this case—”

“Sherlock, I can’t let you anywhere near official proceedings while high, you know that.”

“It won’t be like last time.”

“How do I know that?  Sherlock, you promised you wouldn’t ever touch the stuff again.”

“It’s only for this case.”

“It was only for a case last time and then I found you OD’d in that nasty cesspit you called a flat.”  

Sherlock felt old guilt stir low in his belly at the way Lestrade looked at him; then outrage flarred back in along the seams of his thoughts.

“I know better, I just bought a bad batch, it wasn’t from my usual dealer and I’m hardly going near heroin again.  Slows you down and I need to think faster.  Cocaine is much safer.”

“Do you hear yourself?”  Lestrade stood up, slamming his hands against the desk to get Sherlock’s attention. Sherlock startled and stopped to face him.  “Sherlock, you are officially off this case.  I’m sorry, but I’m not taking that chance again.  Get yourself cleaned up and I’ll consider letting you help again.”

“You won’t solve this without me.”

“I’ll take my chances, I’m not watching you die again.”

“Removing me won’t stop me from investigating.”

“I’ll have you arrested for possession if I catch you anywhere near this case, and you know I will.”

“Fuck you.”  Sherlock snarled and stalked out of the office.  The door slammed shut and Sherlock missed the sound of porcelain shattering as Lestrade chucked his mug across the room.

—

Mycroft was sitting in John’s chair when Sherlock finally made it back home.

“You’ve been smoking.”

“Get out.” Sherlock hung his coat, hands shaking just a bit.  It fell to the ground.  Sherlock tried to hang it again. It fell, a pack of Pall Malls slipping from one of the pockets.  He stared for a long moment at the navy material puddled on the ground and then left it.

“And you’re high.” Mycroft didn’t sound surprised. Most likely meaning he’d been informed and now felt the need to meddle.

“Lestrade called you, did he?”  Sherlock went through the kitchen to his room—empty, bed made and evidence pinned to the wall.  John must have organized while Sherlock wasted a morning at the Yard.

“Sherlock, do sit down.”

“I don’t think so.”  He paced into the kitchen. Mug in the sink, crumbs on the counter—John ate a quick breakfast before popping out, then.  Sherlock reached for the kettle and nearly dropped it, feeling a bit weak.  When had he eaten last?  John would know.  John always knew when Sherlock missed meals.

Mycroft sighed heavily and stood.  “You are not well.”

Sherlock snorted, did his best to fill the kettle with water and then set it to boil on the hob.

“You haven’t given me anything on the Moriarty video.”  Sherlock couldn’t read Mycroft’s expression when he turned to face him. “I thought you had figured it out and were keeping mum, but then I received a concerning text from the Detective Inspector Lestrade.  I’m here to assure you the case does not need this—” his brow furrowed as he gestured at Sherlock. “—level of dedication.”

“Of course I figured it out, Mary needed a—”

“Sherlock, no.”   

“No?”

“Mary had nothing to do with that video, I thought it was obvious.”

Sherlock scanned Mycroft, eyes skipping to new weight loss, lips thinned in uncharacteristic defiance, fingers gripped tightly around the bamboo handle of his brolly.

“Oh.”  The kettle shrieked and Sherlock quickly removed it, unsure what else to do with that new piece of information.  After a moment of blank shock, he made himself file it away for later examination; it was irrelevant to his current case. He grabbed a mug and tea sachet and set about keeping his hands busy as Mycroft stepped further into the kitchen.

“I came here on the assumption that particular case was what had gotten beneath your skin, but now I see I should have listened to the Detective Inspector when he said it is your most recent investigation that has you visiting Sheila again.”

“None of your business.”  Sherlock handed the mug to Mycroft after pouring a sizeable amount of sugar into it.  Mycroft took it with a nod of thanks.

“On the contrary, it is very much my business.”

“Oh yes, right, can’t have the world seeing you have a cokehead brother, bad image.”  Sherlock leaned against the counter behind him, feigning disinterest even as his head swam with a sudden wave of vertigo.

“As true as that is, I am concerned for you, brother dear.”

“No need, I’m just fine.”

“And how about you and John?”

“Now that—”Sherlock said, lowering his voice to a calm threat. “—is really none of your business.”

Mycroft took a sip of his tea to cover the downward twitch of his lips. He watched Sherlock with eyes narrowed.  “Trouble in paradise, I see.”

“Are we done here?  I have a case to solve.”

“I will not stop Detective Inspector Lestrade from arresting you.  Leave this case alone.”

“Your concern has been noted, you can leave.” Sherlock pushed off the counter; he had to catch himself on the refrigerator beside him when the world spun again.  

“Sherlock, I implore you as a worried sibling to leave off of your investigations.”

Sherlock ignored him and walked back to his room, shutting the door behind him.

— 

Marvin Mayweather and Jeremy Newport took center stage on Sherlock’s wall.  John had to have put the pieces of evidence up at random, but it seemed like a passive jab at Sherlock.  The death that mocked his own and the jagged bloody words that screamed out betrayal kept catching Sherlock’s eyes.

Sherlock scrubbed his hand against his burning nose and ignored the growing anxiety eating away at his ribs. 

—

John was still out when Janine came in. He heard the latch disengage downstairs as his fingers slipped into the pocket of his slacks, pads stroking over the plastic there. He jerked his hand away and stood slowly, body dragging against gravity.

Her steps were sharp and determined on the staircase and when she crested she looked nothing short of murderous.  "Sherlock Holmes I will kill you."

"I see you still have the key."  He felt a patter of anxiety against his breastbone.

"I never had a key." The righteous fury in her expression waned with nothing immediate to war against. Sherlock could use a bit of tea.

"Oh?" He wasn't paying attention anymore. He wanted that tea, he needed something to tinker with. He stumbled into the kitchen and began his search. Mycroft’s cup sat in the sink, cleaned along with John’s.  He pulled them out and set them both on the counter.

"Mrs. Hudson let me—oh, sod this!" She followed him into the kitchen and grabbed his arm, yanking him around to face her.

She had pretty eyes. Brown like whiskey, golden around the edge like a cat.  

"Look at me." Sherlock twitched his eyes down to hers and then away. He was more concerned with his tea, with the packet in his pocket.

"Oh, Christ." The fight drained out of her.  "You're using, aren't you?"

His fingers itched and he tried to move out of her grip.  She tightened her fingers in a wire-wrapped vice and held him firm.  “That explains it then.”

"Explains?"  He looked over her shoulder at the empty living area and then tried to see into his room.  He needed to be working.  He needed to make tea. He needed another bump.

"Why you didn't call me!"  

"About?"

Janine scoffed, eyes wide with disbelief. The kettle began to whistle and trill. "Mary, you arse! Neither you nor John had the decency to tell me what happened!"

“Oh.”  Sherlock pried her fingers loose and continued his attempt at tea.  She followed him further into the kitchen.  

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With poison lies, no family ties, who did I come to know?” Sherlock hummed and Janine shoved him hard enough his hips hit the counter, bone knocking with a solid smack.

“What the hell was that for?” Sherlock snarled, bristling along every inch of skin as he turned back around to face her.

Janine had tears in her eyes, face turning red with the effort not to scream or cry or both. “I know you’re insensitive, but really?” He stared blankly and she growled,  “She was my best friend, damn it!”

Sherlock grudgingly acknowledged the guilt stirring back to life, but continued anyway.  “She was a liar.”  

Janine balked and Sherlock saw her pulse beat faster and faster against her throat; her teeth clenched together hard enough that tendons stood out in stark contrast to her smooth skin.  If he drew a finger across them he thought they would twang with the tension.

“WE’RE ALL LIARS!” She finally bellowed causing Sherlock to startle violently. He knocked one of the mugs to floor with his elbow and it crashed to pieces around his bare feet. They ignored it, staring intently and waiting for the other to act.

“Her lies were beyond the norm of human fault,” Sherlock eventually managed.  

“Yeah, such as?”

“Well, she was a killer for one.”  That sounded weak even to his own ears.

Janine’s laugh bled ugly and mirthless into the space between them.  “So is John, so are you.”

“I am not—” Hollow needles, soft bellies, collapsing larynx. Blood warm against his fingers, the gunshot that ruined it all.  Sherlock reeled against the onslaught of images.  He turned away from her to hide the horror blooming across his face. A shard of the broken mug dug into the arch of his foot; warmth slicked across the point of pain but he ignored it as he searched for a new mug. “John was a soldier.”

“You can’t deny it.”  He heard the rustle of cloth as Janine knelt down, crockery scraped across the floor as she picked up the pieces.  She sighed. “You’re bleeding.”

“She lied about the baby.”  Sherlock tried again ignoring her concern.  He didn’t deserve it.

“No.”  Janine stood and walked over to the bin, tipping what she gathered into it.  She hissed. “Now I’m bleeding.”

Sherlock felt his stomach jolt, cold settling into his veins.  “What?”

“I said I’m bleeding.”

“Not that.”

“Thank you for your concern.”

“ _Janine_!” Sherlock spun around to face her, desperation prickling at the edges of his eyes, the tips of his fingers. Or that could be the withdrawal—it all felt the same.

“I said no.  I’m assuming you were saying she lied about the child.  She was obviously pregnant, so you must mean you think the father wasn’t John.”

“He wasn’t.”   _Please tell me he wasn’t._

“Yes he was.”  Janine brought her thumb to her mouth and sucked; blood smeared across her bottom lip and teeth.  “Mary had me help her with a paternity test at the clinic.”

“Please.”  Sherlock didn’t know what he was begging for, but it wasn’t for what she was telling him.  “Please no.”

“Would it make her death easier for you to believe that?”  Janine snapped, missing the point completely.  

“No.”  He felt true grief finally gather around his heart.  She saw it and her features softened.  Good, let her think the grief was for Mary.  

Janine stepped over to him gingerly and folded him into an embrace, her shoulders shaking as she cried. Sherlock wrapped her firmly in his long arms, holding her there so that she couldn’t see the realization dawning in his eyes.  

Sherlock watched the evidence finally slot together, piece by bloody piece sticking firmly in the gore and refusing to move when he prodded and begged it to.

He knew who the killer was.

 

 _End Act II_  


	8. Act III Scene i

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A massive, massive shoutout to my beta [Kita](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Teh_Poet/pseuds/Teh_Poet). She's been the epitome of patient--did you know she had to read at least five rewrites of this chapter? That's a lot guys. 
> 
> Sorry for the delay, the closer we get the end the harder these chapters get to write, both emotionally and well, I guess emotionally is the big bit there. So without further delay, enjoy!

“How was the funeral?”  

Sherlock still gripped the fabric of Janine’s blouse, desperate to keep her in place so that she couldn’t see his face.  “I didn’t go.”

“Of course not.”  She struggled against his hold and he let her go, looking away.  

“I think you should leave.”

“Sherlock—”  

Panic began to rise in his throat—he swallowed it down, thick and sticky as treacle along his esophagus.

“Now.”

“Don’t push me away.”  Her whiskey eyes gleamed and Sherlock felt so much guilt gathering at the pit of his stomach, swirling together with the panic that didn’t want to stay locked away.

“Please?”  Sherlock pleaded and she physically drooped.

“Yeah, alright.  Just, you know, take care of yourself?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not and you need to stop telling yourself that you are before it’s too late.”

“ _Janine_.”

She turned to leave, faltered a step and then walked out of the kitchen and down the stair leaving Sherlock with the mess of emotions writhing against his insides.

—

"The child was yours, John, did you know that?"

John looked up from his chair, eyes wide and horrified. The newspaper in his hands crumpled and then tore beneath strong fingers gripped in white-knuckled curves.

“What?”

“Janine told me, she helped with the paternity test.”  Sherlock glanced up from where he lay on the couch and found John’s eyes wet and wide like his world had collapsed; Sherlock hadn’t seen that much emotion in those eyes in so long that he knew this scenario would never play out.  So he stood up, even as a shaking John did and he walked out the door into a long hallway of glossy 221 entryways. John tried to follow but the door snapped shut before he could cross the threshold.

Sherlock opened the next door.

— 

After Janine left, a pressure began to build beneath Sherlock’s skin; a throbbing, thick electricity that crackled and pulsed as he stood still, staring sightless. It expanded, his fingers twitched, and when he couldn’t stand still any longer, he threw something. The crash and shatter of the plate proved so satisfying that he grabbed a mug, another plate, glass beakers and the sugar pot. The hidden whiskey bottle splintered the prettiest, all sparkling-gold-and-amber across the linoleum.  He felt the sting as slivers and shards of the destruction he wreaked stuck to his skin, piercing through the barrier to irritate the flesh beneath.

The heavy scent of whiskey pervaded the air, and Sherlock remembered standing beneath the shower trying the scrub it away and away and away and he’d never be rid of it. It stuck to the inside of his nose and invaded his bones like a fungus.

His chest constricted, air hard-pressed to reach his lungs as his vision swam and tunneled. He stopped grabbing for things, reached out to brace himself against the refrigerator and suddenly found himself on the floor.

—

"The child was yours, John. But you knew that."

“What they hell are you talking about?”  The paper ripped completely as John bolted up from his chair, face red with quick anger.  Once again, too much emotion—Sherlock left and entered the room again.  Same display of anger, but John’s eyes were flat.

“How did Janine know the child was yours but not you?" Sherlock tried in this room.  John sputtered, caught off guard.

“What?”

“Janine told me, she helped Mary with her paternity test.”

“That’s not what Mary told _me_.”  John’s eyes teared up, but the color flashed an empty slate.  “That was my daughter?”

“Why would Mary tell you it wasn’t yours?”

“She, Sherlock,” John said, letting his head fall heavy on his neck.  “And I don’t know, but it seems like Mary, doesn’t it?  All lies.”

“We’re all liars.”

“Yeah, I guess we are.”

— 

Mrs. Hudson found Sherlock propped against the refrigerator, legs splayed out and feet caked with dried blood.  Her footsteps were light and uneven; it was enough to bring him back to the edge of the present.

"Oh, Sherlock, what have you done?" Sherlock tilted up his eyes and watched her without moving, still seeing John in his chair and still feeling the couch beneath him.  The nails of his steepled fingers dug under his chin, his arse hurt and the reality of the kitchen wavered back into focus. 

Mrs. Hudson sighed. "What a time for John to be out, you look like you need a doctor."

Sherlock flinched away from John's name but Mrs. Hudson had already turned around in search of something. She disappeared as she walked down the hallway and then returned with the first aid kit from the bathroom under one arm and a broom gripped in her other hand.

"Did Janine say something to you?" She asked as she placed the kit by Sherlock's thigh. Bit by bit, Sherlock completely left his Mind Palace behind but the desire to speak stubbornly remained absent. He nodded.

"I knew I shouldn't have let her in, but she looked so sad."  Mrs. Hudson swept the area between Sherlock's legs free of debris and then went to the faucet. She returned with a wet linen and slowly lowered herself down.

"It looks like a bomb went off in here, dear. I can't imagine you have any mugs left and all that wasted sugar."  She wiped at the arches of his feet, dislodging shards of porcelain and crusted blood as she went. The cut at his arch, the only one he remembered, split open again and bled until the linen looked more like soiled hospital gauze than a cleaning cloth.  "Oh, no, now look what I've done.  You're bleeding again."

She pulled the first aid kit closer to her and popped open the lid.  "John should be doing this, that cut looks like it needs stitches and my eyes aren't what they used to be, so I could've missed a bit of glass—"

Sherlock shook his head, violently tossing curls back and forth.

"Okay, okay." She put a soothing hand against his shin and he settled back against the refrigerator, reassured.  "He's going to know though."

Sherlock frowned, feigning confusion.

"That you're using again." She didn't look at him as she used the dry portion of the linen to clear away the water and blood. "I don't know what's going on with you, dear, but we all care about you and watching you self-destruct is painful for everyone."

Sherlock didn't respond and Mrs. Hudson kept silent as she applied plasters to his feet.

"There we are!"  She struggled to stand. "My, that was hard on the hip. Now, I'm going to sweep the rest of this mess up and in return you're going to join me downstairs for something to eat."

—

Sherlock tried to humor Mrs. Hudson, but an hour scratched at his limits and, belly uncomfortable around the pastries she’d forced him to swallow, he found himself outside the flat. A fine mist fell, tiny drops catching in his pores and across his lashes as he tilted his face to the gray sky.  He pulled a cigarette from his coat pocket and held it between his fingers for long moments before lighting it and inhaling hard on the filter.  Tobacco smoke melted across his tongue, down his throat and into his lungs where he held it until his head spun and his chest burned.

The nicotine helped take the edge off his riled brain, but the anxiety burning cold against his skin ignited with his heartbeat and only worsened with each pull and exhale. He tried escaping back into his Mind Palace and found the same hallway and doors from before.

—

“Did Mary know?”

“Know what, Sherlock?”

“About you.”

“Probably, but she never said.” This John continued to flip through his paper, not even looking up at Sherlock as he answered.  “You should check her phone, she kept a lot of secrets in there.”

— 

Sherlock went to his room, soaked and chilled; he ignored the photos that now seemed less a jab and more an outright declaration of Sherlock’s failure, and opened the bottom drawer of his nightstand.  

Sherlock closed it. Opened it again. Stared for long moments. Closed it.  Walked away, walked back. Yanked it off its rails and startled in surprise as it crashed against the wall behind him, gouging the wallpaper and paint.

Mary’s phone was gone.

—

Sherlock didn’t know what to do.  That rankled and sat sour in his stomach. He’d searched through John’s room for the phone and when it didn't turn up there he searched every other nook and cranny.  Nothing.  Maybe Sherlock had lost it; there was no guarantee that John even took it.

No, Sherlock must have lost it. Janine had to be lying and Sherlock was losing his goddamn mind with this stupid case.  What was it John had said about their potential suspects?  That he could be an old client.

Sherlock scrambled into the living area, tearing it apart to locate his laptop.  He found it buried beneath papers on the writing desk.  John usually handled his emails, back when they took on cases regularly and everything seemed to work in a simple harmony; he’d not thought to look at his inbox in ages but when the number of unread messages stepped well past the triple digits, he despaired.

Tea. He needed tea. The caffeine would help.

He boiled water for tea and while he waited he inhaled powder from a dish and smoked with the window open and told himself that it all was for the best.  

Then he read messages until his eyes burned and his lungs felt thick with phlegm and tar and he had a suspect to work with. 

—

Sherlock greeted John with a smile.

"You look chipper," John said as he skirted past where Sherlock stood on the landing. He shrugged out of his jacket   “Mrs. Hudson phoned and said I should get back as soon as I could but you look—”

"Yes, yes,” Sherlock waved the concern away with a flippant turn of his wrist.  “I’m fine, just broke some dishes.”

“But your feet?”  

“Mrs, Hudson did a wonderful job.  I may have to make her my new doctor, but all that chattering—”

“Alright, I get it, she’s a wonderful nurse—now why the smile?”  John bounced from foot to foot where he stood by the coat hangers, jacket still in his hands.

“Right, yes,” Sherlock grinned and let his lips spread just a bit too wide.  “You've been extraordinarily helpful."  Sherlock's cheeks burned with the effort of keeping his expression in place, but it seemed a small pain in comparison to walking upright on his ribboned feet.  Mrs. Hudson had done such a fine job mending him, but despite his earlier words, the cut in his heel needed His Doctor, not a plaster and a gentle touch.

"I have?"

"Oh yes! I figured out who our Guardian Angel is!"

"You have." Sherlock ignored the way John stopped in place, body gone unnaturally still as he watched Sherlock. His knuckles had bleached white where they dug into the jacket still in his hands.

"Yes!"  Sherlock turned on his heel and walked briskly through the kitchen and into his room, sure that John would follow.  "The way you rearranged my evidence wall is what did it.  It has to be someone who saw my death as a betrayal, or who reacted to the destruction of my reputation as a personal slight.  I couldn't think of anyone that fit that category and I basically ignored your idea of a spurned client out of hand—but that's exactly the answer!”

John blinked and Sherlock briefly imagined life in the blue there. He announced with a flourish: “A Mr. Michael Winterman is the culprit."

"What?"

“Mr. Winterman, John, do keep up.  I have a total of 34 emails from him spanning as far back as when I recovered that ridiculous painting—”

“The Reichenbach Falls,” John interrupted, voice hollow.

“Yes, yes, that one." Sherlock walked up to his wall of evidence and pointed to the photo of Jeremy Newport's torso. _I believed in Sherlock Holmes_ , carved in red. "His emails all spoke to hero worship, but after I had been discredited they took a turn for the nasty. And then I—" Sherlock shrugged and turned his back on John to give his face a chance to rest. "Well, you know. Anyway, he kept emailing—'I believed in you, Holmes' or 'how could you do it?’"

"That doesn't prove anything."  John stepped forward so that he was shoulder to shoulder with Sherlock. Sherlock could feel the tension radiating off of him but kept his eyes forward.

"Well, who else could it possibly be? The only other people affected like that after my death are hardly suspects."

Sherlock looked over as John reached out and ran his thumb over the glossy photo, eyes sad. "Yeah, guess so." 

—

John went to bed leaving Sherlock the kind of empty that could never be filled. Sherlock paced, stopped, paced, stopped.  His fingers itched and his brain kept obsessing on minute details. John’s thumb across the photograph, the oils of his skin smearing in a glossy streak.  Sad eyes.  Tense shoulders at all points of the day. Sweat rolling down his throat, gathering in the collarbone.  Eyes never open, face always averted. Breathy gasps of sound that stuck to the skin like warmed oil.

Sherlock felt heat pool in his groin, cold wash across his skin, his brain rut into overdrive and then sputtered out, try again: an engine turning over and over but never catching. There were scratches in the waxed flooring from arranging furniture, from using the bed too vigorously; the subtle thick scent of man and cologne and tobacco hung in the air.

Sherlock fell to his knees and then to his belly so that he could shimmy beneath the bed.  There was a loose floorboard there that Sherlock had pried up ages ago, a well cared for leather box hidden beneath it. Sherlock pulled the box free and carried it onto the bed with him, opening it to reveal a glass bodied syringe, gleaming disfigured spoon, petrol lighter, length of baby-blue rubber tubing and several wax paper envelopes.

Cocaine was a drug that Sherlock could justify into nothing but a cerebral aid, like nicotine.  Heroin was something else entirely, a purely physical dampening of the constant roaring in his head. After his last overdose and his subsequent banning from the Yard, he would sit with the needle against his arm for hours, letting the prick and pressure of it will his mind into quiet without ever pushing all the way through. A challenge. Even after John moved in and Sherlock’s world focused down on that small, stubborn soldier, Sherlock would still sit alone in his room with a needle to his skin.  No longer a challenge but a promise that he would never disappoint John.

Now, Sherlock didn’t hesitate.  He let the needle crowd into the vein and forgot about promises made in the past and challenges failed in the present.  His head fell against the headboard and he drowned in a final moment of peace, ignoring the littered wall of evidence shouting at him from across the room.  He didn’t want to piece it together.  He didn’t want the answer.

So instead he smiled and sunk deeper into the euphoria, pretending it all didn’t scream _you fool!_  

—

When reality trickled back into Sherlock’s peripheral, it was followed by the quiet click of the front door sliding shut. The lock engaged with another click and then silence. Sherlock groped about for his phone, arm heavy.  03:04 flashed across the screen when he finally pulled it towards him.

Too early for Mrs. Hudson to be taking a walk. Too early for John to be going to work.

Sherlock debated getting out of bed—if he did he’d have his answers.

He looked at his phone one more time—03:15—and decided he’d take his chances with a fragile peace of mind.  

He fell back to sleep.

—

“You should have told me, John.” Janine’s voice slipped beneath the crack of Sherlock’s door, slowly dragging him out of sleep.  

“I know, it was selfish of me.”  John replied.  

“More than selfish.”

“I know.”  

“I talked to Sherlock yesterday.”

A brief silence, Sherlock could imagine the way John would tilt his head inviting her to elaborate.

“He’s using again.”

Silence again.

“You’re not surprised.”

“No, I’m not.  This case has him wound tighter than I’ve ever seen him.  And he’s been smoking.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“No, we keep missing each other.”

Janine fell silent this time.

“What is it, Janine?”

“He said something awful yesterday.  About Mary.” Janine sniffed about, and her voice came out choked as she continued. “He’s convinced the baby wasn’t yours, John and I don’t know how he could have possibly decided that.”

“I think he wants to believe the worst in her.”

“Why?”

“To protect me.”

“He has such a funny way of showing he cares.  You take care of him.”

Sherlock stopped listening and thought, _We are all liars._ He chanted it in his head, staring at the ceiling with heavy lidded eyes until he slipped back into sleep.

—

John had tea made when Sherlock woke again, groggy and disoriented and more than a little bit techy.  One mug sat on the bedside table by his head and Sherlock had the distinct urge to knock it over the edge and watch it shatter. The floral print stopped him; it wasn’t one of theirs which meant it must be one of Mrs. Hudson’s.

The leather box lay open beside it, syringe obviously used, spoon dirty. Maybe he should knock that off the table instead.

“I think we should talk.”  

“You’re in my room.”

“Yes, I am,” John snapped.  “Brilliant deduction by the world famous Holmes.  Care to guess why?”

Sherlock’s eyes flickered back to the box and John nodded.

“Give the man a prize, he figured it out.” He put his mug down, also bright and flowery, so that he could fish around in his jean pockets.

“You’ve been with Mrs. Hudson—you smell like flour.”  Sherlock said without looking up.

“Sherlock, not important!” John held two plastic bags, one almost full of white powder, the other cloudy with the remains. “Speedballing?  Really?  You’re a genius, you should know that’ll kill you!”

“You shouldn’t be in my room.” Sherlock turned so that his back was to John.  “Go away.”

“Sherlock, look at me.”

“‘Sherlock, look at me.’”  Sherlock mimicked into his pillow, voice pitched as high as it could go.  “I don’t feel like it, John. I’d rather sleep. Thanks for the tea, it was quite considerate. Now, go away.”

“I’ll call Greg, Sherlock.”

“He already knows.”

“What?”

Sherlock huffed and flipped back around so that he could glare. “He already knows, I’ve been kicked off the case and now I’m going to sleep before I pay a visit to Mr. Winterman.”

“Sherlock, you’re acting childish.”

Sherlock continued to glare.  John’s voice throbbed around his skull, stirring to life the headache there.

“How was your chat with Janine, John?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I heard her this morning.  What a lovely conversation you two were having—you’ve gotten better at lying.”  Sherlock didn’t mean to say it, wished he could take it back as John’s face clouded with anger, but peace was such a hopeless thing to wish for.

“You’re an arse.”  John snarled, looming over Sherlock.

“And you’re a liar.”

“Fuck you.”

“Wouldn’t you like that?”

John gave a wordless growl of fury and stalked out of the room.

Sherlock would have done anything to turn back the clock.

—

“John, tell me why.”

“To see color.”

This John was clearly insane. Sherlock left.

“John, what did I do that made you hate me this much?”

“Sherlock, I don’t hate you, not really.”

“Then none of this makes sense.”

“It will.”


	9. Act III Scene ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, a shoutout to my beta [Kita](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Teh_Poet/pseuds/Teh_Poet). She helped whip this chapter into shape and has the patience of a saint to deal with my constant second guessing.

Sherlock watched the flesh of his abdomen split back yellow and red from the blade skating down pale planes of skin.

Thick fingers wrapped around the stainless steel hilt, blunt nails now capped with red crescent moons; a steady lunar pull from collar bone to the dip between iliac crests.

John stood over him, dressed in more white than Sherlock knew him to own; it looked striking against war-tan skin and sun-bleached hair; eyes that should have shown through blue and blinding, stared a flat-slate grey.  Those were real.

"All I wanted was your heart," John said. Blood coated every inch of available skin now and soaked into the fabric of John's shirt, staining it in bright poppy blossoms.

"You have it." Sherlock said as fingers slipped into the open wound and gripped the edges of exposed ribs. The bones cracked away like sandstone, dissolving to reveal an empty, hollow cavity. "You've always had it."

—

Sherlock woke with a start, hands clawed at his chest, heartbeat pounding like thunder against the bones and veins.  He tried to breathe, but for a second, just one, the air wouldn't come and panic invaded every space, like cobweb—sinister-thin and tar-stubborn.

The room spun and he fell back to the bed, air rushing into the spaces panic had claimed, clearing the corners for just a moment.

The cold night gloom had slunk back in, darkening every edge and wall of his bedroom.  No moon that night, just a dull sodium glare that barely limned the edge of his blackout curtains. The apartment felt still.  His head throbbed.  Only the sound of rushing blood filled his ears.  Everything felt too real, too sharp—not at all what he wanted.  He reached for the bedside lamp, intent on finding a dampener, something to make him numb.

The light glared like a sun and he moaned, burying his face in the pillows and wishing everything would just disappear.  He’d go back to sleep if he thought the spectre of John Watson had fled from his dreams, but he still felt the clawing fingers and deep, unsettling emptiness along the surface of his skin.

So he rolled out of his bed, knocking the lamp off the table in an attempt to get rid of that infernal, blinding light.  It fell with a deafening crash; the quieter clatter of the leather box open beside it followed after, spoon and lighter and syringe skittering across the floorboards like living things and wax envelopes bursting open to dust the busted lamp and lightbulb.  Sherlock cursed and sat back on his bed, head falling heavily into his hands.

His room still smelled of flour from John’s earlier outburst.  He reached for his phone and with the dim light navigated his way out of his room.  He left the still-full mug of tea, the lone survivor of his clumsy temper, on the bedside table. The surface gleamed black and thick.

John stood outside his door, eyes wide with obvious surprise at being caught out there.

“I heard noise,” he offered as explanation.

“The lamp,” Sherlock said and edged by him, catching a hint of whiskey.  It stuck at the back of his throat. He tried not to gag.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine.”  His feet stuck to the floor; a dull pain radiated out from his heels and tempered down to nothing but an itch around the ankles. Each step was a slap-pull, becoming slippery the further into the kitchen he walked.

“Sherlock, your feet.”

Sherlock looked down, black imprints of the long curve of his insoles and polka-dot toes followed him from his room, the ones closest to him gleaming wetly.  “They’re fine.”

“They’re not, let me look at them.” Sherlock heard the rustle of John approaching, felt the electric heat of a hand outstretched near his shoulder.  He tensed, John froze.

“Your moods are more mercurial than mine, and that—” Sherlock scoffed as he spun on his heel, biting his cheek against the pain just so he could watch John wince.  “—is saying something.”

“I can be cross with you and still concerned.”

“You're concerned?” Sherlock turned back around, started searching the cabinets: tea sachets, molded bread, water glasses and what was left of the plateware.  No whiskey.  No anything—but Sherlock smelled it—it must have soaked into the grout and wood by now, a permanent part of their flat.

“Yes, Sherlock.”

“It’s hard to tell.”  Sherlock doubled back to his room and grabbed the mug from his nightstand before trailing back into the kitchen, new debris now stuck to every inch of his feet, heroin powder between his toes.  He dumped the sludgy contents into the sink, watching it drain just as sticky and black as his bloody footprints. “I think I want tea, do you want tea?”

“Sherlock, are you even listening to yourself?”

“I am.  I think you’ll have to fetch your mug from earlier, I broke all the others.”

“ _Sherlock_.”

Sherlock hummed and placed an empty pot over the hob to boil.  It hissed, still wet from being washed but as that bit of moisture evaporated there was silence.

“You’re not boiling anything.”

“Fancy that.”

The smell of burning steel filled the flat instead of words.

—

Morning did nothing to ease the tension between Sherlock’s shoulders or curb the desperate craving curling his fingers into his palms.  The skin broke and blood oozed beneath his nails before he felt the sting.  

_“All I wanted was your heart.”_

Sherlock released his grip to yank at his hair, the pressure beneath his skin becoming too much to handle.

_Sherlock wore the white now and John lay on the table.  Blood soaked into everything but John grinned, holding his flesh away to show Sherlock his heart.  It beat sluggishly, grey muscle stretching to reveal the rot settled in the crevices._

_“You can have it.”_

Sherlock bit his tongue to keep from screaming.

—

Sherlock did little to improve his appearance; letting his already unruly curls stick out at every angle and sparing the stubble shadowing his jaw the razor, he grabbed a hoodie to hide the wrinkles of his shirt and gave up on his slacks, no longer crisply creased but rumpled like binned paper.

Night had set again and a fine mist fell as he snuck out of the flat.  He was painfully aware of the fine material of his socks, the pulse of his blood thready and loud in his ears.  His palms itched around fresh scabs and every exposed bit of skin felt clammy and wet like a breaking fever.  He pulled his hood up and wished for something warmer even as he walked away from his home.

With no destination in mind and only a craving crowding his brain, he wandered aimlessly.  As the night aged, the air grew heavier with cold and the threat of snow.  The fine mist had already thickened to rain and then sleet.  He stopped walking, allowed the elements to soak in through the thin pullover, the crumpled shirt and scarred skin.  The chill ran as deep as his veins, infecting every part of him.

He stood there, numb, and felt relief for just one moment—no thoughts, no feeling, just the quiet patter of soft sleet changing to the silence of snow drift.

—

The days that followed were strained, the air heavy with the words continuing to go unsaid.

_I blame you._

_You lied._

_I love you._

Sherlock couldn’t keep still with the weight of them on his shoulders. So he walked around the flat, feet never healing as he paced and paced and paced.  He still smoked, long white cigarettes from bright red packaging that didn’t burn his lungs the way they used to.  He inhaled on them, hoped for some relief and only felt a terrible itch.  The sidewalk outside their flat sported faint footprints scattered about the slush, concrete reopening the wounds.

He paced inside, sometimes barefoot, sometimes in socks and those now were mostly ruined, his sock index in disarray.

He perched on the couch, let his feet settle into the material and wondered how close the end was now.

John watched him when he paced and Sherlock thought he must be wondering the same thing.

—

Winterman was dead.  Not good, not good at all.

“Did you see the paper, Sherlock?”

Sherlock ignored him.  He had, but he was ignoring that as well.

“‘Guardian Angel strikes again.’”  John scoffed, then drank from his floral mug and continued.  “Michael Winterman, an old fan of esteemed gumshoe, Sherlock Holmes—esteemed, really?—was found dead beneath a bit of shrubbery in Regent’s Park, fancy that. Evidence is inconclusive but they may have a suspect, it says!”

Sherlock rounded his shoulders and picked at a loose thread in his shirt.

"There goes your theory, Sherlock."

The thread dug into the pad of his finger.

“There was the possibility of a copycat, true.” John conceded to the room.  “But what, the copycat killed off the actual killer?” John actually smiled, teeth bared.  

The shirt began to unravel and Sherlock pulled harder.

“Or maybe he killed the only other person that could be a suspect.  Rather stupid.”  John took another sip of his tea, still smiling.

Sherlock couldn’t stand it.  He left, or he would have but something John said stilled him.

“Where were you the other night?”

“Walking.”  His voice sounded scratchy from disuse.

“That all?” John raised his eyebrows, disbelieving. Sherlock saw the accusation there and sneered.

“Of course.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

Sherlock made his exit without another word.

—

John sent a text, fingers slowly, painstakingly pecking out a response on the screen. He left the phone on the kitchen table as he went to grab coffee.  “I need out of the flat.”  He said even though Sherlock didn’t ask.  

Sherlock went for the phone as soon as the door downstairs slammed shut.  Most recent message sent to Greg Lestrade.

 _He was out walking_.

There wasn’t much else to the conversation, just texts from days ago asking John to a pub, then asking after Sherlock. This text must be a continuation of a phone call.

_Not good enough._

Sherlock threw the phone and took no satisfaction in its destruction.

—

It all finally came apart with a knock.

Sherlock had perched on the couch again, feet probably fused to the leather with the dried blood that still oozed free of his ragged bandages. He wiggled his toes to check and they refused to budge. He wasn’t yet warmed from stepping out to smoke, just fever-restless and wrapped in skin-tight anxiety.

The knock wasn’t polite—it was loud, angry, aggressive.

Sherlock should have read the paper closer.  He wriggled his toes again and they parted from the couch with a loud, painful rip.  John watched with disgusted fascination but didn’t speak.

The knock continued, rattling the front door on its ancient hinges.

Sherlock tried peeling the rest of his foot free of the couch but even in his apathy agony seared through his ankles and spine.  He winced and continued until his feet were free, bits of bandage left behind.  More blood.

Silence downstairs. Then the uneven footfalls of Mrs. Hudson. Unintelligible muttering.  

“If you don’t properly take care of them, your feet will get infected.”  John finally said, no longer able to ignore the disaster in front of him.

“Doesn’t matter.”  They stung something fierce, broke through the ice that had begun to coat his skin. He flinched again, stuck his legs out long to allow the bottoms of his feet to dry.  He thought they probably were infected at this point, almost wished they were so that illness could claim him before their guests crested the landing.

Hushed voices drifted into the living area, Lestrade and then Donovan.  The knocking transferred to the steps—heavy footfall that harkened their arrival. Mrs. Hudson followed them up.

“Sherlock, I need to—” Lestrade attempted to say in way of greeting.

Sherlock and John ignored him to continue their argument.

“It does.”  John gestured at the bloody mess of Sherlock’s feet.  “I’ve had an infection, it’s not pretty.”

"No," Sherlock agreed.

“Sherlock,” Lestrade tried again, frustration tearing at his level tone.  Donovan had her arms crossed, discomfort radiating off of her in palpable waves.  Indecision too.  Interesting.

“Just need a round of antibiotics and a strong pain killer. Maybe some of my heroin will help,” Sherlock continued, his voice raising at the end, hysterics not far off from hijacking him completely.

“Sherlock!”  Lestrade snapped, startled.

“That’s not funny, Sherlock, you know how it makes us all feel!” John snarled.

Sherlock grinned at them both.

“Shocked, really?  It’s not like either of you have done anything about it.”

“How can you say that?” Lestrade said and John frowned his agreement.

Sherlock laughed, not a scrap of humor in the sound before turning to address Donovan. “Did you know, Sally, Lestrade here let me out of his office high on cocaine and John didn’t even try to take the heroin I had on my bedside table for all to see?

Lestrade flushed red, shame then anger. Donovan gaped at him, horrified but not entirely surprised.  “Sir?”

He opened his mouth, probably to defend himself but John spoke first.

“You let him out of your office?”  

Sherlock grinned at John, I-told-you-so smirk stretching his lips in a manic curl.  It was all dissolving into so much chaos.  It was all so loud.  

“John, not now—”

“Yes, now!  You should have phoned me!”  John stood from his chair and widened his feet belligerently.  

Donovan looked ready to join in the arguing, but something stayed her tongue.  Instead, she directed her attention to Sherlock, eyes narrowed and head tilted to the side.  She was shaken and unsure and maybe even feeling betrayed, but there glimmered something beneath the surface that refused to reveal itself.  Sherlock studied her back, trying to pick apart what he couldn’t read.  He turned his head away when she nodded, feeling like he had given her more of himself than she had given him.

“ _That’s enough_!” John and Lestrade froze and turned their attention on Sally. Sherlock stared at his feet, exhaustion starting to take root in his joints. Silence, then:  “You’re acting like children—all of you.”

“Sergeant Donovan—”

“With all due respect, sir, shut up.”  She pointed at the floor where smears of blood marked the path of Sherlock’s pacing.

“There’s blood everywhere.”  

“It’s mine.”

“Yeah, and it’s all over the crime scene too.” She snapped, directing the conversation back to the matter at hand.

“Not possible.”  Completely possible.

“It was.”  Lestrade said, finally gathering his frustration back close to his chest. “We need you to come with us, just for questioning.”

“No.”

“Sherlock, don’t make this difficult.”

“I didn’t do it and questioning me would be a waste of time.”  He feigned thoughtfullness for a moment.  “But then, you’re always wasting time, so it wouldn’t be anything new.”

“We have DNA evidence putting you at the crime scene,” Lestrade growled.  Sherlock could see him trying to keep his temper in place by the tick at his left eye.

“The killer has shown distinct disdain for me so far. It's a set up.” Sherlock refused to move, he really didn’t want to. He was tired and worn thin and in a room full of people who thought the worst of him.   Well, Mrs. Hudson probably didn’t but she kept unusually quiet where she still stood by the stairs.

“It’s not just the blood, Sherlock. Remember the Pall Mall ash you found on Timothy Biggs?  Same as what we found on Winterman.  Same as what you used to smoke—what you’ve been smoking if your coat pocket is any indication.”

“Do you really think I would be so sloppy as to leave that much evidence behind?”

"I don't know, but I do doubt your judgement right now and so much is pointing to you.  I have to take you in.”  The mask cracked a bit and Lestrade’s eyes just looked sad and tired and regretful.  “We don’t have a choice.”

“I’m not going.”

“Sherlock, just go.”  Sherlock almost forgot John still stood in the room.  He had his arms at his side and his fingers clenching and unclenching in a slow rhythm, back painfully straight.  Sherlock glared, trying for anger, but he could feel every piece of himself start to splinter.  John just watched as Sherlock found himself trapped.  

_You did this._

“Then I’ll arrest you for possession.” Lestrade spat the words as if they tasted of bile.

“Arrest me, then.”

Lestrade inhaled, hands balling into fists.

“I’ve got it, sir,” Donovan said before Lestrade could start yelling.  He exhaled, bluster blowing out on the heavy breath.  His shoulders sagged gratefully.

“Yes, fine.”  

“Sherlock Holmes, I am arresting you for possession of narcotics. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.  Anything you say may be given in evidence. Up you get.”

Sherlock said nothing as Donovan ushered him up.  She had to force him around to handcuff him, but he didn’t truly fight.  

“Can I have my shoes?”  He wiggled his toes for emphasis and she winced.

“Yeah, sure.”

Mrs. Hudson, face lined deep with worry, hurried to grab Sherlock’s coat and shoes, handing them to Donovan as she lead him down the seventeen steps out of the flat.

Snow fell in a cascade of wet flakes that melted as soon as they touched the street.  It was as dark as a London street could manage, the squad car unlit and empty and the snow casting light around in an ethereal glow.

No one stared as Donovan prodded Sherlock towards the car; he looked more like a man being supported than contained, body bowed and wobbly.  Sherlock expected to be stuffed into the backseat, left there to wait and chew on the falling sky around him while John and Lestrade argued upstairs; instead Donovan stood beside him, eyes directed forward, unfocused.

“You didn’t do it.”

Sherlock laughed and it stuck and rattled around his chest.  He coughed and tried to hack it free.

“You sound uncertain.”

“You couldn’t have.  You weren’t even in London for most of the murders,” she continued.  “But I think you know who did.”

Sherlock kept silent and she huffed.  

“Of course you do.” She ran a hand over her face, looking as exhausted as Sherlock felt.  “Back when we convicted Tomas Bridge, you ignored a lot of the evidence available.  Did you know then?”

“No.”  Sherlock had never had this much trouble reading Donovan before—evening shadow and low yellow highlights did him no favors, smudging the nuance in every crinkle and stress line. 

“We put an innocent man away.”

“And that’s surprising? Your people are incompetent and no one of value was being detained,” Sherlock snapped but she held up a hand, shaking her head against his indignance.

“I said ‘we’, and that’s not my point.” She finally looked at him full on, letting him see her eyes.  They looked flat with haunted defeat.  “My point—” She took a steadying breath and looked away again. “My point is that I’ve put too many innocent people behind bars.  Directly, indirectly—it doesn’t matter and I can’t sit by and let it happen again.”

“They weren’t innocent.”

“They weren’t murderers!” Snow gathered in her hair, started to stick to the surfaces it had previously melted against. She shook, trembling like the cold do, clenching her fists like the angry and impotent.  “And you were innocent.”

“I’m not.”

“No, you’re not.  But you’re not our Guardian Angel.”

“There’s still the possibility of a copycat.”  

“Yeah.”  She dropped his shoes to the ground and draped his coat over the hood of the car.  “Here, put them on.”

Sherlock looked at her and then over his shoulder where his hands were cuffed and useless.

“Right.”

Loud shouts erupting from upstairs broke the odd flurry-calm and Donovan jolted as their false sense of privacy crashed around them.  They both turned to the source, watched the blinded window behind which John and Lestrade screamed and blamed.  Mrs. Hudson’s squawking just barely made itself known between the two men’s anger.

Donovan’s shoulders squared and Sherlock knew she’d come to some sort of decision.  

She circled behind him.  “I’m going to cuff your hands in front, should make getting your shoes on easier.”

She unlocked one circlet of the handcuffs and then hesitated. A muted clang, degraded by concrete and old rainwater, caught Sherlock’s attention.  The tiny key gleamed dully between his legs, muted sodium light tarnishing the silver.  He only had a moment to react. Pivoting as she bent to pick it up, he knocked her back and away; she stumbled, tripping on the curb to land spectacularly in the slush. She cursed.

This time he hesitated.

“Don’t.”  She struggled to stand, slipped.  

Sherlock snatched up his shoes and his coat and then he fled, the world melting to white around him.

 

_End Act III_


	10. Act IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry.

“Did you know?”  Lestrade asks the second he walks through his door.

“Not at first.”  Sherlock says, then adds.  “Not for a long time.”

“But you did know.”

“Eventually, yes.”

“And he what, got a free pass because you two were shagging?”

A beat of silence.  Then Sherlock’s hands crash down against the desk between them, bringing his face barely a handful of inches from Lestrade’s. “Yes, that’s exactly how it works.  If I get a good fuck out of it, I’ll just go ahead and ignore the clues and let the bloody-minded idiots of New Scotland Yard chase their tails.  It will be such a _great laugh_.”

For a moment Lestrade looks stricken, physically pained by the sharp edge of Sherlock’s words and then Lestrade leans closer still.

“Why didn’t you come to me?”  Lestrade grabs Sherlock’s face between two shaking hands.  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You would have never believed me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I suppose I never will.”

 

—

 

Sirens blared loud and stringent, tearing the quiet from the gentle snowfall flowering around Sherlock. He placed himself in an obvious hideaway behind a skip, crouched against the cold with hands buried deep in his hair, trying to tug himself back to reality.

The snow hurt like a living thing, biting at his feet and fingers and nose.  It painted every surface blinding white, blue shadows the only variation in the landscape spread out on all sides.  The smell sang clear and crisp before a copper tang tainted the air.  He looked down, blood seeping from between his toes into the icy slush around him, zigzagging out like veins.

John stood before him, white wings spread out wide around him, brushing against the snow, almost indistinguishable in their termination.

“I was good.”  He said as the red from Sherlock’s feet soaked into the lowest hanging feathers, trailing up the spines until nothing but blood hung from John’s shoulders.

“I was in love.”  He said and Sherlock screamed, voice shaking away the solidity of this John.  He dissolved, blue eyes last to go.

“You took everything.”

The snow melted to feathers around Sherlock.  He crouched in the middle of impossibly tall walls of them, all stained with red.  He didn’t move as they collapsed and swallowed him whole.

The smell of rubbish rushed back in, crowding into his nose.  He wore shoes; they slipped and slid on his bloody feet but they were there.  White mixed with the yellows and blacks of evening, the flashes of police cars.

He had to find haven, he had to escape out of the cold before he died in an alleyway remembered for the crimes of a man he could never save.

He pushed up and continued to run.

 

—

 

St Bart's morgue was cold, continuing the illusion of numb-nothingness that Sherlock so desperately needed to keep moving.  His feet stung and burned in belligerent counterpoint, trying to root him to the spot, scorch him from the inside out. He almost let it, surrendered and watched his skin crumble away to fine ash and his fat crackle and melt like paraffin.

He leaned into the doors and nearly tumbled to the slick floor as they gave way around him. Molly, intent on something at her desk, screamed and jumped hard enough her knees slammed into the underside of her workstation with a sickening crash.  A low moan of pain slid from her chest as she turned in her chair to face the intrusion, eyes wide enough Sherlock feared they’d roll straight from the sockets.

"Sherlock?"  Molly gasped scrambling up from her chair. It slid away with a squeak and thunk.  "What are you doing here?  Are you alright?"

The desire to feign well being only made a cursory appearance, rooting him still as he tried to respond. Witty never even tried. He shook his head, tried to speak and couldn't think of a word to say.  She frowned at him, seeming to compose herself after only a breath or two.

"How can I help?"

He looked at his feet, then back at her. "It hurts to walk." He managed before his knees buckled and he lowered himself to the ground.

“Show them to me?”  She approached him tentatively, watching as he painfully removed his now ruined shoes.  The socks and bandages took longer, peeling away red and yellow with discharge.  They both cringed away from the rancid smell now free to permeate the air around them.

“Oh, your feet!  What happened to your feet?”   She dropped to her knees to examine them, nose wrinkled when she stooped in close.  

“Doesn’t matter.”  He winced, tried to keep his eyes open.  He couldn’t rest.  He wasn’t done.  “I need to keep going.  I don’t have much time.”

There was a moment where Sherlock thought Molly would succumb to panic, her eyes had stretched so wide again and the whites had dominated so much of her face, but then she swallowed hard.  With a shuddery breath she closed her eyes and on the exhale she opened them, determined.

“I have antibiotics at home, and your extra clothes are still there from before.”  She folded up and started rummaging through drawers before returning with hands gripped around disinfectant and gauze and a wicked packaged needle. Thread dangled between it all like abandoned webbing.

“This will hurt.”

Sherlock didn't feel a thing.

 

—

 

Sherlock would have walked on the blades of his feet just to escape the confines of St. Bart’s walls and ceilings and memories, but Molly insisted on a wheelchair.  The thing creaked and rattled and shone bright as a spotlight on his crumpled back: look here, look here, _look here_!

They would find him before he figured out his next step, they would lock him up and he would never know the meaning of all those intimate, bruising touches and carved up bodies.

“Molly, I need—”

“Hush Sherlock.”  And he did because the inevitability of it all weighed down around him, bumping and tilting and warping all sense of preservation.

He settled in the cab, quiet and filthy and unaware of his companion as old words stung as his eyes.

_“That...was amazing.”_

_“Do you think so?”_

_“Of_ course _it was. It was extraordinary; it was quite extraordinary.”_

_“That’s not what people normally say.”_

_“What do people normally say?”_

_“‘Piss off’!”_

Snow swirled past his window and he smiled at it like an old friend would, warm with the laughter echoing in his head.

 

—

 

Sherlock startled with a gasp, chest warm and rumbling and heavy.  His hands fluttered to the weight there, contacting soft fur as he tried to place his location.  Yellow eyes watched him quizzically before the cat yowled and left him cold.  It took him several moments to gather his breath back to him and determine exactly where he was.  He felt warm and light and electric with anxiety.

Chamomile and dried cherries and the quiet undercurrent of formaldehyde placed him at Molly’s when the cat didn’t immediately clue him in.  He had his fingers steepled beneath his chin but he couldn’t remember ever leaving the cab let alone settling in to think.

“Toby’s very protective of you.”  Molly sounded tired, a yawn stuttering out the sentence. Bags sat heavy beneath her eyes, pronounced by the late day light, subdued as it was by the storm.

“I didn’t mean to sleep.” He could think of no other explanation.

“I don't think you were. Your eyes were open."

Exhaustion still ate at his bones, eyes burning with the weight of it.  Sherlock moaned as he sat up, wincing as every muscle screamed stiff protest.

“I need to go.”

“No, you need help.”  Molly stood from the recliner she had curled up in.  Toby took her place almost immediately, seeking her warmth.  

Sherlock looked away and she padded into the connected kitchen.  Rustling and clanging and rushing water filled the silence for a moment and he tried to let it drain in through his ears and fill his brain.  The click of the hob sounding and then Molly returning brought him back to the surface.

“Let me help.”

Sherlock thought for long moments, coming to one conclusion each time a trail of thought ended.  He smiled at her and knew by the way she pursed her lips it never came close to his eyes.

“I never appreciated you enough.”

Molly went unnaturally still, eyes bright and worried and oh so wide.  “Sherlock?”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s all right, I know.”  She spoke low and frantic, as if to reassure a dying man that he had years left ahead of him when he didn’t even have one. “It’s fine.”

A long moment of silence extended between them before Molly said, “Tell me how I can help.”

“I just need you to make a phone call.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Molly didn’t pry.  She watched him with something like resignation and grief and then the kettle screamed and the moment was broken.  Sherlock watched her go again.  More clattering, the susurrus of hot water against tea sachets. The clink of a spoon.  Gentle, domestic sounds. Safe sounds that lulled him back down into the darkness before his thoughts could gain another handhold.

Snow fell like feathers against the window as the day crawled its way back to night.

 

—

 

Showing as much concern as Mycroft has in the past few days, Sherlock is surprised he hasn’t imploded, hasn’t melted down into a structureless sack of melted organs and bones in his leather throne.

“I’m taking the job.”

“You’re not.”

“You can’t stop me.”  He picks up a letter opener from Mycroft’s desk and presses the tip to one thumb.  He can’t feel it, tries the rest of his fingers as Mycroft watches, face paling.

“Please don’t do this.”

“It’s already set in place, I just thought you should hear from me that I’m taking it.”  The silver is so dull.  He drags it against his palm and is surprised when a trail of red follows its path.  Mycroft shoots up from his chair, scraping it back against the wall as he snatches the blade from Sherlock’s hands.

“Stop this,” he snarls, tossing the blade behind him and Sherlock watches placidly as he tries to gather himself back under control. “Do you know what this will do to Mummy?  To father?  Sherlock, you have others to think about.”

The quiet flame that has been gathering beneath his breastbone since he spoke with Lestrade flares to life.  “I have done nothing but think of others and look at the mess I’ve created!  You can’t stop me from this, if you try I’ll just find another way to die.”

Mycroft flinches away.  Blood from Sherlock’s hand has stained his sleeves and he stares at it like he’s never seen blood before in his life, morbidly fascinated.

“Please, Mycroft.  Let me do some good before I—” Sherlock tries to reign his own escaping hysteria, but the tears are free before his next breath.  “I don’t have anything left, I’m standing here on borrowed breath and-and, I have to— I can’t pull the trigger myself.”

“It’ll destroy me, brother.”  Mycroft says, voice low to cover its roughening.

“Please.”

“They won’t forgive me.”

“They will.”

“I won’t forgive me.”

“You’ll survive.”

Mycroft takes a deep breath and Sherlock can see him locking away every bit of humanity he has left, binning it as he says. “I won’t.”

But he will help Sherlock.

 

—

 

Sherlock would always end up back at 221 Baker Street.  The world could end and he’d stand in its rubble, holding the crumbling pieces of foundation in his fists until the very impression of the flat broke the skin and marked him for life.

Unable to enter, he watched blended in to shade and shadow across the street.  He’d be caught out eventually, his coat marked him as Sherlock Holmes like a thumbprint, even skewed and rumpled as it sat on his shoulders.  Light would steal his hiding place, brush across him in neon look-here hues and he would not have the energy to fight.

His concentration never wavered as a sleek black car stopped just shy of him, door swinging open on his brother.

“You are a fool.” Mycroft said it without ire, just shaky resignation.  Heat from the car’s interior folded out around Mycroft and brushed against Sherlock’s exposed hands in invitation, but Sherlock refused to acknowledge it; he strained to watch the top window for activity, longed to wrap himself in the warmth of the fire he imagined to still glow there.  The whine of a violin, his violin, slipped like a caress across his ears and he swayed.  
“I will not do this, Sherlock.  Get in. Now.”  

Each note rose and fell like wind mournful through brittle brown leaves and frozen branches.  John would sit in his chair, face warm with the yellows and oranges of the flames crackling in their hearth, eyes soft as he watched Sherlock shift in time with his own melody.  

“Please, brother.”

John tilted tired eyes to him, smiled real and affectionate. He stood, covered the distance between them and took the violin from Sherlock’s hands.  The sound of music kept playing around them as John directed them in a slow dance across the room.

Mycroft extended a hand, fingers curled in desperate supplication.

Sherlock ignored him, ignored the encroaching scent of whiskey and cured barrel musk until the last note played and the cold leeched every shade of warmth from the scene around him.  John looked Sherlock in the eye, irises sharp, cracked ice and grin cut by a razor.

“Let me help you any other way.”

“You could have had this.”  John said and Sherlock cuffed his eyes and didn’t even try to tell himself it was melted snow that wet their corners.

“You can’t.”  Sherlock tried to chase the warmth but that would never be his reality.  He refused to at Mycroft and stepped back further from his open door, wrapping himself into the cold.  “This is the only way.”

"I didn't save you for this." Mycroft stepped out of the car and stretched himself to his full height, as if to cow Sherlock into behaving.  Sherlock stepped aside to bring the flat back into focus.  Lestrade’s police car camped out front, buried in new snowfall.

"You didn't save me at all."  

“You are letting emotion rule you.”

“I could say the same of you.”  Sherlock finally broke away from staring at the flat and allowed himself to look Mycroft in the eye, adding the proper heaviness to his next words.  “It’s over, you can’t save me. So please, just help me.”

“Thirty minutes.  That is all I can do.”

“It’s enough.”

 

—

 

“You’re free to go.”

It reeks of Mycroft.

“How?”

“Concrete evidence placing you out of the country for at least three of the murders and a lot of ass kissing.”  Donovan sighs.  “Lestrade wants to see you first, then you’re your brother’s problem.”

“I need to make a phone call first.”

“Yeah.”  She untucks her phone from her back pocket and hands it over.  She doesn’t look him in the eye, shoulders hunched and eyes red beneath a furrowed brow.

“Do you regret it?”  Sherlock asks as he searches out the number he needs.

“No.”  She looks up and everything there in the lines of her mouth and eyes declares the contrary. “Yes.”

The phone rings. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The receiver picks up and Sherlock turns his back to Donovan.   “Hello, Lady Smallwood?  Yes, good.  I would like to willingly offer you my services.”

A beat of silence.

“Perfect.”

 

—

 

Sherlock enters the flat unimpeded, footsteps uneven on the stairs as he ascends.  He places all his weight on the one that squeaks and continues forward, announcing himself.

John stands in their living space, facing him with squared shoulders.  There’s his gun on the coffee table, easily in reach.  Sherlock would guess the safety has been disengaged, the chamber loaded.

“You expected me.”

“You were loud.”  John shrugs.  “I was suddenly alone in the flat.”

“Why?”  Sherlock won’t stall; there is nothing left to them, not even time.

John tilts his head to the side, inviting clarification.

"Why all this?"

“I missed the color.” John says it like it should make perfect-crystal sense and Sherlock thinks back to all the Johns marching around his Mind Palace, back to the one he thought insane.

"The color?"

John hums and watches and shifts on his feet.

“I don’t understand.”  Sherlock says finally as he edges closer; John does nothing but widen his stance. The gun gleams like new ice between them.

“You brought color to my life, the world was so grey after you left.”

“I—” Sherlock moves his mouth around words he wishes were there, but they don't fully form.  John chuckles and it's so cold.

“When I saw you lying there, it was like looking at the wreckage of a fallen angel.  There was no color, just the great broken wings of your coat, and so much blood.  It was all so black.”

Sherlock had seen the pictures; they'd done such a good job of his broken body; made an art-room worthy diorama and displayed it bright for all to see.  They’d shaken it for good measure and congratulated each other as nothing fell out of place.

“I don’t understand.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?”  John’s voice is gentle venom that seeps through the pores, poisoning them both.  “You’ve never watched your best friend die, you’ve never watched your partner stripped of all the lies and left cold and loveless for all to see.  You’ve never lost your color.”

“You don’t know that.”  Sherlock is watching all of that unfold, sees the skin slip and slide against the sanity John has allowed to rot within himself.

“No.  I suppose I don’t.”  His eyes shine dull and distressed and then wild.  “Have you?”

“You didn’t just kill bad people, John.”  Sherlock can’t bring himself to answer him; even right at the edge he can’t admit what he’s losing.  “Why did you kill Millie?  Or David?”

“I needed it to stop.  This was too much to keep up and I’m tired.”  John glances at the gun.  “I needed it to be over and I needed you to pay attention.”

Sherlock shakes his head, hair stinging against his cheek and temples. He doesn’t know if he’s disagreeing or rejecting.  It feels the same.

“I missed the color, the vibrancy of having you around at every corner. I missed the battlefield and the good we did.”  John says and then huffs, a self-deprecating little sound that just doesn’t match.  “It sounds silly in words.  But it’s true.  The first one was an accident but when I saw his blood, how red it was, it felt like having you back just for a second; it was intoxicating.”

Sherlock steps closer, eyes carefully trained on the pull and stretch of John’s muscles.  John watches him back, even steps away from the coffee table as if to appear harmless.

“I couldn’t stop obsessing on it.  It was the only color I had seen so vibrantly since you—” John swallows, clenches his fists then continues.  “—Had to have it back.  Had to have you back.”

“So you killed people and mutilated them as what?  A warning?  John, we never did that.”

“I was protecting people.”

“You killed your wife, John.  You killed your _daughter_.”

“She lied!”  John seethes, fists clenching tightly at his side.  “She lied about who she was, she lied about loving me.  She didn’t trust me just like you didn’t trust me and it’s just too much.”

John laughs and while it’s been ages since anything sounded real coming from those lips, the pitch of it rankles deep in Sherlock’s ribs.  “I mean, when I met Mary she made it easier for awhile.  And I did help people again and I thought having her and healing people would be enough even if everything was so dull but then you—you just pop up like nothing’s wrong and my whole world just came crashing down.”

“I—” Sherlock tries to think of the right words again and John snarls at him for the effort.

“ _You asked why_.”

Sirens creep into the flat, a distance off but growing closer. Mycroft only promised so long.

“I loved you and you left me and the world went gray.  I loved Mary and some of the color came back and then she tried to kill you and you tried to get me to take her back, Sherlock.  You wanted me to take her back and she lied.  She couldn’t keep the color around and you couldn’t be arsed and I was so tired.”

“I never meant to take it away.”  Sherlock understands.  He remembers but he’d had the thought of John to keep him right; he had known he’d return to London and had thought it would all fall back together.  Instead it all fell apart and he’s watching the pieces gather at his feet in tribute to his failure.  “But your daughter?”

John doesn’t answer. The sirens wail louder.

“I could have helped you.”

“No.”  John shakes his head, gentle at first then in long painful sweeps.  He stops and his eyes glisten wetly even as the iris houses nothing but stone.  “You couldn’t have.  It was too late. It will never be like it was before you left and you had to pay for that.”

John’s words steal the breath from Sherlock’s lungs and leave him empty.  He steps forward and stops when John speaks again.

“You need to pick up the gun.”

Loud pounding erupts from downstairs, shouting muffled by the distance and heavy wood.

“No.”

“Do it, or I will shoot the first person who comes through that door.”

Sherlock hesitates.  He barely hears the doorknob jostle, the heavy rattle of the latch shaken in its lock.

“ _PICK IT UP!_ ”

It’s filling the palm of his hand before Sherlock realizes he’s not much more than an arm span from John.  

“I never meant to hurt you.”

“You did.”

“I love you.”

“I know. I loved you too but it’s far too late for that.”

There’s a brief, heavy silence and then the flat explodes with the cries of shattered wood and barked orders.  Sherlock brings the gun level with John’s heart, the snout nearly kissing John’s jumper as officers swarm up the stairs on heavy, urgent feet.

“I’m tired, Sherlock.”

Sherlock hears Lestrade’s steps crest before the rest of them, the skid and thump of his boots a long familiar sound.  John’s eyes flicker over Sherlock’s shoulder before falling back to Sherlock, dismissing everything but the space between them.

“Sherlock, don’t shoot!”  

Sherlock barely hears him; he’s lost in the pounding of his heart, the sudden true-blue of John’s eyes as tears make them bright and real.  John mouths _please._

“Sherlock, please don’t”

Sherlock sees John locked away forever, or the tables turned with him behind bars and no matter the outcome they both rot away as lurid news stories and forgotten histories.  Nothing so nuanced as what they had been and what they became.  So when John steps closers and shapes his lips around another silent plea, Sherlock nods.

“Sherlock, put it—”

Sherlock pulls the trigger.

John drops.

A single hole blooms out across John’s chest where dark lifeblood drains.  Outside sirens continue to blare and blue and white explodes across the flat.  

“Sherlock, what have you done?”

Sherlock’s hands are yanked behind him, clamped together in steel.  Something is being shouted at him, he can feel breath pulsing against his ear.  He’s not breathing, he can’t hear past the rushing in his ears, he can’t see anything but John.

Sherlock’s heart is pulp.

He never wanted to see this life stilled before his own. Yet here he stands, still drawing breath with hands too clean for the guilt lining him in lead. He stares down at his mistake.

 _I’m so sorry_.

 

_End Act IV_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's an epilogue that will be posted in the next hour. At the end of that I'll provide a link to a list of fic I'm dubbing the AUF Shock Blanket (they're all happy johnlock stories/John and Sherlock just happy together). 
> 
> A HUGE fucking shoutout to my beta and friend [Kita](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Teh_Poet/pseuds/Teh_Poet). She's put up with a lot of shit and was ruthless in tearing apart this finale and making it work. 
> 
> Honorable mention to blue_bird and my writing buddies in the nano chat who also had to deal a lot with my constant back and forth. I love you all! 
> 
> I used [these transcripts](http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/43794.html) for reference


	11. Act V

_6 months later_

 

Sherlock sits with his back against the crumbling remains of a shanty house, blood covering his hands, soaking his shirt through.  HIs lungs are full of smoke and his veins have collapsed from so many needle jabs to dull the pain.

But he’s still there, still alive to watch the sun rise another day.

It’s red like the blood on his hands, like new autumn leaves and war and hate and passion and everything else he’s been told red is supposed to be.  It’s not beautiful, it’s not his new beginning.  It doesn’t sing alive in his chest, it’s just a reminder.  As the light crawls up his calves and creeps across his thighs, all he can remember is his failure.  As it brightens the sky he wonders how, even in the end, he couldn’t get it right.

He coughs, blood thick on his tongue but he will live.

And that is his biggest failure.

 

 

_End Act V_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that's it. Just one more punch for the finish!
> 
> As promised here's a link to my [ AUF Shock Blanket ](http://catie-brie.tumblr.com/post/130361557945/auf-shock-blanket), a list of happy/fluffy or just crack-tastic Johnlock fic to counteract what I just did to you.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who stuck through this with me, after a year of writing I have finally published my first chaptered fic and I am both elated and heartbroken to claim that! Thank you for the lovely comments and please, don't go to hard on me after these last two chapters haha!
> 
> I'll see you around!
> 
> -CB

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like you can find me on [Tumblr](http://catie-brie.tumblr.com/) where I would love to answer questions, comments, chats or just have you as a friendly stalker. It's also where I periodically post about fanfic I am working on.
> 
> Kudos and comments, as always, are greatly appreciated.


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